siir ozbilge

Siir Ozbilge is a contemporary Turkish woman painter and designer. In the 90's she lived and worked in Vienna, and moved back to Istanbul, her hometown in 2002. Siir devised her own technique in painting. She mixes sand, stones, earth, paper, and crystals with acrylic color, and creates thick tissues on the canvas. Occasionally she uses textiles and other materials.

The primitive begins alone; he inherits no practice. Because of this the term primitive may appear at first to be justified. He does not use the pictorial grammar of the tradition –hence he is ungrammatical. He has not learnt the technical skills which have evolved with the conventions –hence he is clumsy. When he discovers on his own a solution to a pictorial problem, he often uses it many times –hence he is naive. But then one has to ask: why does he refuse the tradition? And the answer is only partly that he was born far away from that tradition. The effort necessary to begin painting or sculpting, in the social context in which he finds himself, is so great that it could well include visiting the museums.

But it never does, at least at the beginning. Why? Because he knows already that his own lived experience which is forcing him to make art has no place in that tradition. How does he know this without having visited the museums? He knows it because his whole experience is one of being excluded from the exercise of power in his society, and he realizes from the compulsion he now feels, that art too has a kind of power.

The will of primitives derives from faith in their own experience and a profound skepticism about society as they have found it... John Berger