Canan Atalay

Canan Atalay (1967 – )

Canan Atalay, was born in Bulanık in 1967. She received her undergraduate degree in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Hacettepe University in 1989, her master’s degree in 1992, and completed her doctorate in art in 2001. In 1995, she received her master’s degree from the Ceramics Department at the UWIC School of Art and Design in the UK, and in 2003 she graduated from the same department with an MPhil degree. In 2004, she became an associate professor and continues to work at the Department of Ceramics at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University’s Faculty of Fine Arts. Her works have been exhibited in numerous group exhibitions in Russia, the UK, Morocco, the United States, Germany, South Korea, and in her own country. She has held fourteen solo exhibitions, two of which were abroad. Her works can be found in various collections and museums.

In the early nineties, Canan Atalay began to attract attention with her series of compositions inspired by the Yazılıkaya Wall Reliefs. In these works, the structural problems of painting were emphasized and a spontaneous, simple and monumental effect was achieved. Despite the differentiation and enrichment of her thematic approaches in the following years, the relationship between abstraction and figuration remained Atalay’s primary concern. Later, she created works based on the home and living spaces in her search for simplified form. Her paintings, which reflect her passion for defining her own living space, are portrayed in monochrome or multi-colored palettes with striking touches of reds, yellows, mysterious blues, browns, and grays. The elements that make up her compositions are sometimes placed side by side, but more often arranged in sequence to create a deep spatial impression. Atalay places importance on the reflection of light and the vitality of the paint strokes, and she creates her paintings using organic-geometric relationships with images such as the sea, sky, mountain silhouettes, stars, and flowers. Amidst dramatic barren landscapes, she symbolizes the traces of an inner journey with colors in small architectural spaces. In her works containing silent natural sections, she reflects the reality of urban experience.