The Merey Collection: ‘A Tale of Passion’ Quoted from Prof. Burcu Pelvanoğlu.

The Merey Collection’s Creation Process

The Core of the Merey Collection consists of a family collection which goes back four generations.

Following generations who painted and commissioned paintings, Ahmet Merey also started collecting and purchased his first painting with the intention of creating a collection. “I met many artists when my relative Selman Pınar opened the Tiglat Art Gallery. I bought my first painting in the year 1978 when I was getting married, from Mehmet Pesen. He had an exhibition at the Tiglat Art Gallery that year. I had seen the painting at that exhibition and fell in love with it. After the exhibition, around November, I went to his house in Kızıltoprak to get my painting.

When we look at all the paintings that Ahmet Merey has inherited from his family, we see that all paintings have been purchased from modern artists of those particular times. As well as collecting paintings from early periods in Turkish art from time to time, Ahmet Merey has continued the family tradition and focuses his collection mainly on current artists of the age he lives in.

Portraits

The “Self Portraits” in the Merey Collection present us with a long slice of history starting from artists of the 1914 Generation to this day. Along with offering the opportunity to delve into a wide period of time, the self portrait section of the Merey Collection also draws our interest with different material and attitudes such as the use of photographs, video and space arrangements.

Artist Portraits

The artist portraits in the collection reflect the relationship between teachers and students, painters and painters, sculptures, writers, musicians, poets, and theater actors; presenting the audience with a kind of social history study. In these portraits, we may sometimes observe predominate symbolist elements such as in Namık İsmail’s “Ahmet Haşim Portrait,” while sometimes notice how the most portraits of the time were painted for the most popular artist of the time. The Tevfik Fikret and Bedri Rahmi portraits painted by different artists in the collection are good examples of this.

 Family Portraits

Although Ahmet Merey’s great grandfathers bought paintings, his grandfather Ahmet Kara was the first to become a patron of the arts by forming relationships with artists i n the family. Ahmet Kara became friends with İbrahim Çallı and first had him paint a portrait of himself, then his wife Makbule Kara. Later with the women in his paintings “Sisters at the Beach” and “Sisters on the Island,” Çallı was inspired by Makbule Hanım and her younger sister.

Other Portraits

The Ahmet Merey Collection includes many paintings, from early period portraits by unknown artists to younger generation artists. Comprised of around 450 paintings, the portrait collection also has an anonymous portrait collection with anonymous portraits; men in these paintings are generally portrayed as Ottoman sultans. Among the portraits of women, we can find gypsy women, women with modern attire, a diverse range of women and Art Deco style portraits.

Pero Collection

The Pero Collection makes up one of the subheadings of the Merey Collection.

The Pero Collection is one comprised of work that Ahmet Merey started collecting in the last ten years, inspired by his mother’s name, all created from a range of materials such as all the canvas, photographs, videos and statues. When Merey’s grandfather was naming his daughter Pero, he was inspired by Roman mythology. In Roman mythology, Pero visits her father, who is imprisoned, every day, and feeds him with milk from her own breasts from between the prison bars. The story of Peri is one that has been a subject many times in the history of Western art. Ahmet Merey, upon seeing Rubens’s painting – one of the most famous Pero paintings – in the Hermitage museum, he decides to create this collection and asks artists to create artwork based on Pero. The Pero artwork in the Merey Collection present the different perspectives of each artist in regards to stories. While mainly consisting of figurative oil-painting on canvas, the Pero themed creations in the Merey Collection also stand out with artists’ use of a diverse range of materials and styles in terms of their approach to the theme.

Nazım Hikmet Collection

Purchasing the paintings exhibited in the Nazim Hikmet Exhibition, organized in the year 2010 by the Nazim Hikmet Foundation, Amet Merey opened a new section in his collection with 33 paintings.

The Nazim Hikmet Collection is comprised of an array of paintings by Alaettin Aksoy, Alp Tamer Ulukılıç , Asaf Zeki Yüksel, Ayşe Yonca Saraçoğlu, Caner Karavit, Feyyaz Yaman, Hakan Gürsoytrak, Huri Kiriş, İrfan Okan, İrfan Önürmen, Mehmet Güreli, Metin Karayağız, Murat Akagündüz, Mustafa Horasan, Mustafa Orkun Müftüoğlu, Nalan Yırtmaç, Neslihan Pala, Nilgün Sabar, Selçuk  Fergökçe, Sezai Özdemir, Taner Güven, Temür Köran, Umut Germeç, Veysel Kurucu, Yalçın Karayağız, Zeynep Özdemir’in Nazım yorumlamaları and Nazım. The artwork in this collection, in some, depicts Nazım with his fights and wars, while in others with his weaknesses, and in others with various symbols. 

Representation of Contemporary Art/Different Material and Concepts in the Merey Collection

The predominant sections of the Merey Collection are the portraits (self-portraits, artist portraits, family portraits), the Pero Collection, Nazım Hikmet Collection and Post-1960 figurative art. Figurative art is quite unyielding – both in terms of its collection and in terms of material. These are oil paintings on canvas. Most of the artists in this collection were graduates of the Academy, giving us the opportunity to observe how the Academy, after1960, was able to pass on the tradition of figurative art from generation to generation with satire, irony, criticism, and a political stance. The numerous artists in the Merey Collection who are outside of such a determined line are also worth mentioning. The figurative paintings in the Merey Collection are categorized according to the subject matter and current issues they are related to; allowing us to observe the collection accompanied with new stories. Focusing on the reactions artists gave to the city, women, male-female relationships, the state of the individual and current politics allows the different trends to not follow each other one after the other, but rather be witnessed side by side, transforming the collection into the form of a story.

Other Work

The fact that the Merey Collection is a family collection inherited from great grandfathers is the reason why artwork outside Ahmet Merey’s style exists. While under normal circumstances they would be considered to weaken the quality of a collection, the artwork that is outside the general concept of this collection will, in contrast, strengthen it.

The reason for this is, apart from the small number of anonymous portraits, artwork such as scenery, interior, still-life paintings and photographs which are invaluable documents in nature, are works of artists from Ahmet Merey’s main collection. When we consider each collection as a research laboratory, we can see that these artworks outside the main theme actually complete the collection, while some are even the masterpieces of Turkish painting. For instance, İbrahim Çallı’s “Ball” painting is first in line amongst these masterpieces.

Ipek – Ahmet Merey Painting Competition

The “Young Painters Competition” organized in Ahmet Merey’s relative Selman Pinar’s Tiglat Art Gallery in 1985 was an inspiration for not only the Merey Collection but also the “Ipek-Ahmet Merey Art Awards” which were to be organized as of the year 2000. Open to high school and university students and all artists under the age of 35, the first, second and third-place winning paintings of these competitions entered the Merey Collection. The Merey Family has been organizing the ““Ipek-Ahmet Merey Painting Awards” since the year 2000, with the aim of encouraging young artists in the fields of painting and sculpture.

The Merey Collection Archive

One of the most significant factors which make the Merey Collection stand out from all other collections in Turkey is the fact that the collection is supported with an archive. Ahmet Merey describes the formation of this archive in an interview: “I also take the artists’ notebooks. There are many notebooks from contemporary and older artists in my collection. When I take paintings from young artists, I also take their patterns. I also have easels from a few artists. I try my best to collect as many art books as I can. I also have an interest in art-related ephemera. You cannot exactly call these a collection, but I see these books and notebooks as a supporting summation next to my painting collection.