Fusun Inan Art Gallery

Istanbul-based contemporary artist Füsun Onur, an influential Turkish modernist whose career spans more than fifty years, has been chosen to represent Turkey at the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, to be held between May and November 2021. Sponsored by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), the pavilion will be curated by Bige Örer, the director of the Istanbul Biennial and contemporary art projects at İKSV.

Throughout her prolific career, Onur has produced works from everyday materials that explore the relationship between space, time, rhythm, and form. A graduate of Üsküdar American Academy for Girls, Onur studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul and then went to the United States in 1962 on a Fulbright scholarship, earning a master’s degree in sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1967.

“Curiosity has always been part of Onur’s method,” wrote Mine Haydaroğlu in the January 2013 issue of Artforum. “She likes to work with the auras of spaces and the essence of objects and to figure out how these might relate to communications between people as well as individual sensibilities.”