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b. Ankara-Türkiye, 1957
Bedri Baykam began painting at the age of two and held his first solo exhibition (May, 1963) at just six years old at the Ankara Art Lovers Club. Since childhood, his works have continued to be exhibited worldwide —including in Bern, Geneva, New York, Washington, Paris, London, Rome, Munich, Stockholm, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Sydney, among many others. Bedri Baykam is the son of Dr. Suphi Baykam (Medical Doctor, Politician), and Mutahhar Baykam (Senior Architect-Engineer). He studied economics at Sorbonne University in Paris from 1975 to 1980 and earned an MBA. During this time, he pursued acting studies at L’Actorat. From 1980 to 1983, he studied painting and filmmaking at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC, now CCA) in Oakland. Baykam became one of the pioneering international figures of the Neo-Expressionist movement that emerged in the 1980s. While sustaining his relentless urge to explore the possibilities of the painted surface, he expanded his artistic practice into installations, “livart,” short films, video art, and performance. Placing political art, philosophy, and art history at the core of his practice, he consistently pushed the boundaries of contemporary artistic discourse. In the 1980s, he was also among the graffiti artists who reshaped the visual landscape of New York. He lived in California until 1987, after which he returned to İstanbul. To date, he has held 155 solo exhibitions—half of them international—and participated in numerous group shows. He has curated several national and international exhibitions, produced short films and videos, and has also performed as an actor. He taught art and art history at three different universities: Bilkent University in Ankara, Doğuş University, and Altınbaş University in İstanbul. Baykam’s works have been exhibited at institutions such as the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), the Picasso Museum (Barcelona), the Roland-Garros Museum (Paris), the Pinacothèque de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam (Netherlands), the Museum der Moderne Salzburg, the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, the Osthaus Museum Hagen, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), the Bahrain National Museum, and the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen (Düsseldorf). He has also appeared in the Cairo, Venice, Istanbul, and Buenos Aires Biennials. His gallery exhibitions include major venues such as Daniel Templon (Paris), Stephen Wirtz (San Francisco), Galeri Baraz (İstanbul), The Proposition (New York), Galeri Siyah Beyaz (Ankara), E.M. Donahue (New York), Galerie Kuchling (Berlin), Lavignes-Bastille (Paris), Galerie Pages (Geneva), Opera Gallery (London), and Gloria Delson Contemporary Arts (Los Angeles). A leading figure in the evolution of contemporary art in Türkiye, Baykam encouraged major shifts in the art scene from the 1980s onward, including the increased presence of large-scale works and the more open engagement of political criticism and eroticism in the artistic production. As an extension of the digital and painterly transparent layers he explored throughout his career, he began creating his widely acclaimed “4D” works—four-dimensional lenticular pieces—in 2007 and continues to produce and exhibit them. Baykam is recognized as one of the most prominent figures not only in the art world but also in Türkiye’s socio-political landscape. Through his manifesto “The History of Modern Art is a Western fait Accompli,” his book “Monkeys’ Right to Paint”, and numerous other texts that continue to be cited decades after their publication, he articulated a strong stance against Western monopolization in art. Long before multiculturalism became a dominant theme in contemporary art discourse, he courageously criticized Western biases with his first manifesto, distributed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) in 1984. In 2004, Istanbul Bilgi University organized a major symposium titled “The 20th Anniversary of Bedri Baykam’s San Francisco Manifesto,” with the participation of renowned international art historians and critics including Edward Lucie-Smith, Carmelo Strano, Kim Levin, Levent Çalıkoğlu, Patrick Wright, Şahin Yenişehirlioğlu, Ali Akay, Elisabeth Couturier, and Denys Zacharopoulos. The manifesto was later included in Why Are We Artists?: 100 World Art Manifestos, published in 2017 by Penguin Books London as part of the Modern Classics series. A founding member of the Turkish National Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts (UPSD), Baykam served as the organization’s president for 18 years. At the 18th General Assembly of the International Association of Art (AIAP/IAA), UNESCO’s official partner for visual arts, held in Plzeň (Czech Republic) in 2015, he was elected World President. He held this position for seven and a half years, later passing the presidency to South Korea during the 19th Extraordinary General Assembly held in Istanbul in 2023, where he was also elected Honorary President of the IAA. At the 17th General Assembly of AIAP/IAA in Guadalajara (Mexico) in 2011, Baykam’s proposal—presented as President of UPSD—to declare Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday, April 15, as World Art Day was unanimously accepted. In 2019, during Baykam’s term as IAA World President, the initiative was brought to UNESCO and again unanimously accepted, officially placing World Art Day among UNESCO’s International Days. Baykam has authored 33 books, and 61 catalogues and 9 books have been published about his work. He has written extensively on art and politics for various periodicals and continues to write for his long-standing column in Cumhuriyet newspaper (the centenary daily of İstanbul), where his first articles appeared in 1987. Throughout his artistic career, Baykam has also played an active role in politics. He served on the Republican People’s Party (CHP) Party Assembly between 1995 and 1998 and was a candidate for CHP presidency in 2003. He is married to journalist-writer Sibel Baykam and they have a son, Suphi Baykam, born in 1999. Baykam is the founder of Piramid Publishing (1998) and Piramid Sanat (2006) and continues to live and work in Istanbul.
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EXHIBITION: LES DEMOISELLES REVISITED
TARİHLER : May 2 - June 14 2025
OPENING : May 6 from 6:30 pm
PRIVATE VIEWINGS : starting May 3rd, private viewings available by reservation only
LOCATION : S/BEAUBOURG GALLERY 35 Rue Quincampoix, 75004
CONTACT: Micaela Neveu +33 (06) 50 55 07 28
S/Beaubourg Gallery +33 (01) 42 71 12 16
GALERIE@ARTENGAGEMENTCONSULTING.COM
Under the direction of Art Engagement Consulting (Micaela Neveu) and Art Mouvance – Société pour l’ Art (Patrik Gunnteg), Les Demoiselles Revisited marks a highlight of the 2025 season at the S/Beaubourg Gallery. Extending an uninterrupted dialogue with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon — intensified on the occasion of the painting's centenary in 2007 — the exhibition follows in the continuity of BEDRİ Baykam’s approach, the major figure in the introduction and dissemination of new pictorial abstraction in Turkey during the 1980s. Rejecting any mimetic reinterpretation, Baykam offers a post-orientalist re-reading of Picasso’s foundational work, where collective memory, geopolitical critique of the gaze, and the subversion of Western aesthetic canons intersect. Through a stylistic approach of fragmentation, the artist unfolds a quasi-baroque and plural language, made of disjointed sequences, juxtapositions, and superimpositions, liberating the visual narrative from any linearity to establish a perpetual movement. This formal variability, constitutive of his practice, places Les Demoiselles Revisited within a phenomenological logic: the exhibition becomes an active experience of perception, where the viewer, confronted with a plurality of signs, continuously reconfigures their relationship to the image. Between homage and subversion, Baykam reactivates the blind spots of modernism — coloniality, fetishization, scopophilic eroticism — and, through a fragmented approach, reconfigures a critical memory of art history. The eroticized aesthetics of bodies, languorous postures, the sensuality of silhouettes, and the play of feminine shadows critically interrogate the representations of the feminine in a Western perspective.
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW
The exhibition Les Demoiselles Revisited by BEDRİ Baykam, presented at the S/Beaubourg Gallery, stands out for its innovative expographic approach based on a methodology of performative curating, where the act of exhibiting becomes a staging in itself. This paradigm, inspired by Austin’s principle of How to Do Things with Words, extends the reflection of art historian Micaela Neveu, for whom "looking is organically integrating what is given to be seen, making it active within oneself." The exhibition thus becomes an immersive space, where the viewer actively engages in a perceptual experience. In a continuous critical dialogue with Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon — further intensified by the centenary of the painting — Baykam offers a contemporary reinterpretation that goes beyond mere homage. The central figure in Turkish contemporary art and a pioneer of new abstractionist painting in the 1980s, he situates his reinterpretation within a thematic, philosophical, and political framework. His work is deeply rooted in Western metaphysics while also engaging with contemporary geopolitical tensions. Committed to an aesthetics of the “Beau”, Baykam questions canonical masters through the lens of current ideologies, particularly critiquing the interpretative excesses of orientalism, both in the United States and Turkey. Drawing on Cubist principles — the multiplication of perspectives, perspectival fragmentation — he deploys both visual and narrative fragmentation, where female figures, detached from their original contexts, are projected into ambiguous spaces, charged with the eroticism of the body. For Professor and art critic Hasan Bülent Kahraman, the composition thus becomes a theater of intersecting gazes: women who look and are being looked at, Picasso observed by Baykam, who in turn scrutinizes him. This mise en abyme of the gaze questions its very production, as well as the position from which it is exercised. Baykam thus generates an open, polyphonic narrative, freed from any univocal storytelling and structured around a perpetual movement of interpretations. This architecture of the gaze, where subjectivity and specular reflections intersect, as suggested by Kahraman, recalls that of Las Meninas by Velázquez, where the baroque device of representation reflects the nature of the gaze and the act of artistic creation as a world that is a dream, an illusion. Formally, Baykam employs collages, free brushstrokes, transparency effects, and lenticular surfaces to craft a baroque aesthetic of narrative multiplicity. Through these techniques, he revitalizes the imagery of the body, shadow, postures, and the eroticized feminine figure, while renewing the modes of perception and contemporary visual language. Through his often-faceless silhouettes and bodies abandoned to nudity, Baykam posits voyeurism and interrogates how the spectator’sgaze imposes itself upon the feminine figure. He also interrogates the stereotypes embedded in the history of Western art, where the female body is often reduced to a mere object of desire or the enduring figure of the prostitute. Through this approach, the artist highlights established visual conventions, offering a new reading of the feminine body and shedding light on the complex dynamics of power, desire, and domination that underpin its representation. The performative scenography designed by Art Mouvance transforms the encounter between artwork and viewer into a reflective experience, where the identities of the Self are redefined in the very act of perceiving. In contrast, the second part of the exhibition, located in the basement, adopts a minimalist scenography, conceived as a space of retreat conducive to concentration. This setup isolates a series of works that directly address nudity and sexuality, not as provocation, but as tools for deconstructing visual and cultural norms. Restricted access to adults aims to preserve the symbolic and critical intensity of this confrontation. Under the direction of Micaela Neveu and Patrik Gunnteg, Les Demoiselles Revisited goes beyond the simple juxtaposition of works to question the very function of the exhibition. It explores the boundaries of art, its ability to awaken both the intellect and the senses, embodying a continuous quest to renew artistic languages in a world that is constantly reconfiguring the relations of power, identities, and narratives.
Bedri Baykam, Vous Êtez Bien Chez Madame Claude, mixed media on canvas, 168x238 cm, 2025.
Bedri Baykam, Consommer Avec Modération, mixed media on canvas, 150x220 cm, 2025.
ABOUT S/BEAUBOURG GALLERY & ART ENGAGEMENT CONSULTING
Under the direction of art historian and founder of Art Engagement Consulting, Micaela Neveu, the new S/Beaubourg Gallery —located just steps from the Centre Pompidou —has, since its reopening in mid-March 2025, been reimagined as a space for reflection, experimentation, and critical thought. More than a venue dedicated to aesthetics, the gallery has become a true laboratory, where art questions, deconstructs, and redefines our relationship to the world by challenging artistic and cultural conventions. Its inauguration on March 21, 2025, was marked by the exhibition Entropie by Antoni Taulé, praised by both critics and the public for its powerful spatial conception and its resonance with contemporary concerns. This foundational project launches a new program focused on performative curating, developed by Art Mouvance – Société pour l’Art, represented by Patrik Gunnteg, where the exhibition itself becomes an act of thought, exploring the boundaries between art, culture, and critical discourse. In this spirit, a partnership with Art Mouvance has given rise to the Club Dumas, a monthly literary and artistic circle. Each meeting will introduce a theme in dialogue with the current exhibitions, creating a space of exchange among writers, artists, thinkers, and audiences around the resonances between text, image, and society. The Club Dumas embodies the gallery’s ambition to become a vibrant space of intellectual engagement, where art nourishes both thought and vision. Beginning in September 2025, S/Beaubourg Gallery will launch a new series of projects devoted to the intersection of art, artificial intelligence, and emerging forms of creativity. These initiatives reflect a clear commitment to exploring how new technologies can act as sensitive, critical, or poetic extensions of contemporary artistic practice.