His Life, Works, Museum House and Last Exhibition: Muzaffer Akyol
Muzaffer Akyol was born in 1945 in Trabzon. In the 1968-1969 academic years, he entered the Istanbul State Fine Arts Academy Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu workshop. Muzaffer Akyol graduated from the academy in the 1973-1974 academic years and worked as an art teacher for a while. The artist has a unique interpretation of the topics he has chosen from the environment and daily life, and has approached the relationship between society and tradition in a visual-critical manner. He has established relationships between dream and reality by fictionalizing nature, which he treats as a common living space, sometimes in an exaggerated and sometimes plain style.
Muzaffer Akyol, a lover of olive and pomegranate trees, explains his thoughts about pomegranate as follows: “Pomegranate is one of my indispensable items… Now it is a form that makes hundreds of grains live without upsetting each other, breaking each other, exploiting each other and seeing each other through the transparent membrane between them. Pomegranate is the symbol of fertility. This understanding reflects the democracy that the human family misses and expects, being against discrimination, people being respectful to each other and building bridges of friendship and exchanging with each other”.
Muzaffer Akyol’s Museum House
Muzaffer Akyol met Asmalımescit in 1969 when he came to the workshop of his teacher Bedri Rahmi. He loved the region, which was inhabited by different cultures and had a special intellectual background; this place became a haunt. Painting and literature masters of the period were gathering here. Intellectuals would gather here to discuss poetry, literature, politics, and social relations. There were names such as Özdemir Asaf, Can Yücel, Orhan Peker and Edip Canser.
Muzaffer Akyol, who loves Asmalımescit very much, became a tenant to his friend Engin Okan, who bought an old five-storey house from here in 1985. Muzaffer Akyol opened exhibitions as a workshop-house between 1995-2000k. When asked whether it was effective in your paintings at that time, he said, “This is an area of great energy and great intensity. The peace and deep feelings of being here certainly affected me and, depending on me, my painting. It was tremendously effective in terms of production, colour and composition. The size of the pictures grew; I found the opportunity to move more freely. This place is more intertwined with art, this time the number of people coming to the workshop has increased. Can Yücel, Mehmet Kemal, Cemal Süreya, Ümit Yaşar always used to visit this house. I am sure that these also have an effect on my paintings ”.
In every room of the house there are portraits of people who have left traces in the life of Victorious Akyol. On the ground floor there is his mother Nuriye, Mustafa Kemal at the entrance, and on the top floor there is a picture of his father… On the next floors, portraits of Can Yücel, Nâzım Hikmet, Aşık Veysel, Mehmet Kemal, Cemal Süreya and Bedri Rahmi are seen. So, each room has an owner. It is possible to see a connection with the portraits in the pictures in these rooms.
Muzaffer Akyol’s Personal Exhibitions
53 solo exhibitions in various places in Turkey and abroad; Muzaffer Akyol, who held 5 solo exhibitions in the United States of America, Australia and the Netherlands, lives and works in Istanbul. The artist, who transformed his workshop, which he opened 16 years ago in Asmalımescit, into a museum-house, has made it possible to see 50 years of art life closely in the five-storey museum-house.
Muzaffer Akyol’s Last Exhibitions
The third joint exhibition of Muzaffer Akyol and Gaye Su Akyol, in which different materials are included in the art as well as canvas painting; It was presented to art lovers at 2019
“Tahayyüller Okyanusunda İki Kuş” Exhibition presented to art lovers two different perspectives on a thought of two independent generations, two different expressions of the father and daughter, who were born in different times and in the near geography and witnessed the last quarter century together. The practice of defining new symbols by following the traces of the culture they were born into, struggling with the chaos and political chaos of the concrete world, embracing dreams with poetry, colour and music, and transforming a conservative world with collective dreams by creating counter-reality is also at the forefront of this exhibition.
In Gaye Su Akyol’s works, women were changing their power, desire and change redefined gender roles with a tight solidarity as if they had contracted between them, accompanied by an intense atmosphere.
In Muzaffer Akyol’s works, the movement, transformation and scream of the universe were embodied in the form of pomegranate. The pomegranates scattered around and the big cake shared at the table of wolves represented the harsh conditions of the political season.
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