The Museum Ludwig opens Füsun Onur’s retrospective curated by Barbara Engelbach from Museum Ludwig and co-curated by Emre Baykal from Arter, Istanbul.
The press release by the museum stated that although her impressive and varied oeuvre has been readily accessible to an international audience in group exhibitions on a regular basis, it has not been sufficiently appreciated. The first survey of her work was held at Arter. The Museum Ludwig is now presenting her work to a larger audience in a major retrospective.
Over the past few years, the Museum Ludwig has mounted major surveys on significant artists whose work had previously only been cursorily acknowledged, including Joan Mitchell (2015), Nil Yalter (2019), and Isamu Noguchi (2022).
This exhibition with Füsun Onur represents another focus on a body of work whose significance has not yet been fully appreciated.
Onur grew up Istanbul, where she studied sculpture between 1957 and 1962 during the period of radical change in Turkish art history of the 1950s and 1960s. As prestigious state commissions for art declined at that time, the influence of the state also waned, and artists began creating an environment in which they could experiment with new forms. From 1962 to 1966 Onur continued her studies abroad in Washington, DC, and Baltimore, after which she returned to Istanbul. As a student, she had already felt encouraged to develop her own artistic perspective, and she continues to pursue this goal today. Her early work, which cannot be categorized in any of the art movements of the time, conveys an idea of her independence. Her sculptures combine a visual vocabulary employing elements of abstraction, Constructivism, and Minimalism with humor.
A reoccurring element in Onur’s work is her connection to Istanbul and her family’s home in Kuzguncuk, where she lived with her sister, İlhan Onur, who died in 2022. It is filled with furniture and mementos that date to the early twentieth century. Located directly on the Bosporus, the house served Onur as a starting point for new works, enabling her to create pieces that examine the Bosporus and the experience of living on the water in constantly changing, new aesthetic forms.
Most recently, Füsun Onur’s Once Upon a Time, her contribution to the Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022, brought her into the public eye. The large-format installation consists of miniature figures hand-made from wire that transport visitors into a world of fantasy.
The exhibition in the Museum Ludwig comprises ninety-four installations, some of which fill entire rooms, from the past sixty years. In addition, Onur will create a new, large installation for her retrospective.
