BEDRİ BAYKAM
b. Ankara, 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.
