Carmen Turyn is an artist specialising in gouache, pastel, and black pen and ink drawings.
About CARMEN TURYN
She has exhibited in South Africa, Italy and the UK as detailed in her CV.
Her work stems from a childhood spent in a small South African town, surrounded by endless landscape punctuated by occasional thorn trees and scattered signs of habitation.
Later, her studies of San Rock Art led to the realisation that the San, as hunter gatherers, understood form through movement. This, in turn, liberated Carmen's own perception of form as detailed in her Artist’s Statement.
All paintings, gouache and pastel; all drawings, felt tip pen, charcoal or gouache.
Mounted paintings come in 3 sizes: 89 x 59cm, 56 x 47cm, 42 x 51cm
work
Testimonials
Excerpt from a text on Carmen Turyn's work by Art Historian Ian Jeffrey.
"...Carmen Turyn's pictures are convincing because they have the look of what might be called natural images. Paintings often look assembled , for they have been made from accumulated brush marks. These show traces of their making too, but in general they have the abraded appearance of ancient images...
In male versions of the creative moment we are used to kinetics and to a variety of fierce mark-making, a lot of it autographic. Carmen's paintings, by contrast, are much more self-denying, as if that is really how it was when the planets passed by or when the hills took shape. It is as if this is what it was once like. Imagine your way back to the beginning.”
Ian Jeffrey is a writer and curator. He has held posts as tutor and professor at Goldsmith's' College London University; Recipient of Royal Photographic award; Exhibitions curated at Royal Academy and Hayward Gallery; Author of a series of books on photography published by Phaidon. Thames and Hudson, Arts Council, National Museum of photography.
Statement by Peter de Francia, former Professor of Painting, Royal College of Art.
“As a creative artist, Carmen Turyn is difficult to classify and within the current cultural climate I would dream this an advantage. She has always produced paintings that appear at first sight to be expressionist in mood and in which colour is used emotively, playing an important role in her visual imagery. But the designation of her work as stemming from expressionism would be to use the term in a singularly restrictive way. For the basis of all she does consists of a process of self discovery and frequently of self analysis and a definition of this in itself is always hollow frontiered. But this relentless search for a synthesis between the world of appearances and an interior dialogue concerning such a world is central to her concerns. For this reason her work seldom appears introverted.”
Artist statement
My work...
My work stems from a childhood spent in a small town in the Western Transvaal, South Africa, a place of vast hypnotic space and magnificent landscape.
The small multi-cultural White population, far from their own roots, seemed unaware of living in a Continent of thousands of years of Art History, and amongst Mankind's oldest living inhabitants - the San Bushmen.
When, as a young adult, I emigrated to the United Kingdom, I had, like my Lithuanian parents before me, to reinvent myself in a strange new culture.
It took some years for me to understand the need, in my paintings, to return to my roots. I found my influences then changing to Ancient Arts and those Arts made specifically for religious or magical purposes.
An important recent influence on my work has been that of San Rock Art.
Working from reproductions of their paintings has demonstrated to me that the San understood form through movement. This results perhaps not only from their knowledge, as hunters, of animal movement, but also from their close association with Nature.
Their images were made in trance-state, bringing them ever closer to a Supernatural element.
This powerful community of daily life, religion, and art, connects with a fundamental thinking, one in which here are no opposites, only interdependence. San Art therefore, thousands of years away from me and far from their perceptions and values, speaks to me on a profound level.
My work is impelled by movement. Movement = breath = life.
In these changing and turbulent times, I reach out as much as ever to that ancient art which accords with the innermost depths of my being.
Artist's Cv
Carmen Turyn
Lives in London, UK
Education
Goldsmiths’ College of Art:
BA painting & Art Teachers’ certificate 1969 - 1974
Awards
Thames & Hudson Prize – final year Art History thesis 1974
Goldsmiths’ Prize 1974
Gestetner Award 1982
Anglo-Jewish Grant 1984
Referees
Mrs. S. Breitberg-Semel, Curator, Israeli Art, Tel Aviv Museum
Professor Peter de Francia, former Head of Painting School,
Royal College of Art, London
Exhibitions
South Africa:
Argos Galleries, Cape Town
South African Artists under 30 1959, 1960, 1961
One-woman show 1960
Lidchi Gallery, Johannesburg 1965
Wolpe Gallery, Cape Town 1964 - 1968
Invited visit to South Africa to see San Rock Art 2018
Israel:
Galleria Hakibbutzim, Tel Aviv 1982
Jerusalem Artists’ House 1982 - 1983
Museum of the Holocaust, Herzliyah
South African Painters in Israel 1984
Wizo - Ceramics, Tel Aviv & Haifa 1986 - 1990
Various galleries in Herzliyah & Kfar Sabba 1985 - 1992
Italy:
Studio Aperto, Rome
Solo and group exhibits 1996 - 2005
United Kingdom
London:
Whitechapel Gallery, London Group 1972
Mall Galleries, UK Art Students
Representing Goldsmiths College 1973
ICA Gallery, London Group 1973
Podbrey Gallery 1985 - 1990
Balfour Trust, Group Show 2005
Zebra Gallery, Hampstead 2007 - 2008
British Musem AUK calendar 2011
Ben Uri Gallery
International Jewish Artists of the Year 2012
Teaching
Hammersmith Art College, London 1974 - 1975
Urdang School of Dance, Art Department, London 1973, 1976
Beaufoy School, Art & Remedial Department, London 1975 - 1981
Haifa University, Israel 1982 - 1984
1 year visiting lectureship
Ort Herzliyah, Israel 1983 - 1984
Tel Aviv Museum, Israel 1984 - 1986
Spiro Institute, London 1994
Millfield Art Centre, London 1994 - 1996
Contact me
To discuss commissions, exhibitions, or to purchase any work contact:
Carmen Turyn
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