Painting, memory, testimony, and the silent weight of history.

Nurettin Erkan graduated from the Department of Painting at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University in 1993. He opened his first solo exhibition in 1992 at the Istanbul Press Museum while still a student — an early indication of a practice shaped not only by painting itself, but by an urgent engagement with memory, history, and human experience.

In the same year, he founded the Akdeniz School of Fine Arts, where he taught painting for many years. Approximately 1,500 students passed through his workshops; many later continued their artistic careers in Turkey and abroad. For Erkan, teaching became an extension of his artistic position: a space of dialogue, experimentation, and collective thinking.

Erkan’s work moves between painting, installation, and conceptual practice. His large-scale surfaces often carry traces of historical violence, displacement, silence, and collective memory. Rather than treating painting as a purely formal discipline, he approaches it as a field of testimony — a space where image, material, and memory confront one another.

Erkan approaches painting as both image and evidence: a surface where memory, violence, and silence leave visible traces.

His paintings frequently oscillate between figuration and abstraction. Layers of paint behave less like representation and more like accumulated time: fragments of erased narratives, emotional residue, and social memory embedded within the surface. In this sense, his works resist spectacle; they ask instead for duration, attention, and reflection.

In 2005, Erkan was elected to the executive board of the Turkey National Committee of the International Association of Plastic Arts, affiliated with UNESCO. During this period, he curated large-scale exhibitions and organized conferences, workshops, and artist gatherings at a time when contemporary art in Turkey was undergoing significant transformation. He also contributed critical essays to exhibition catalogues and independent art publications.

One of the defining moments of this period was his monumental 6.5 x 25 meter painting-installation, exhibited at the TÜYAP Istanbul Art Fair in memory of civilians who lost their lives in massacres against the Kurdish people. The work stood not only as an image, but as an act of remembrance — transforming scale into a form of collective witnessing.

In 2006, he was invited to participate in the 5th International Drawing Biennial. The works he produced for the biennial were exhibited at the West Bohemian Museum in the Czech Republic. Before moving to the United States, Erkan presented large-scale conceptual painting-installations at various biennials and international art fairs, including Istanbul Contemporary and the TÜYAP Art Fair.

To date, his works have been exhibited in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Greece, the United Kingdom, France, Moldova, and the United States. His works are included in private and institutional collections, while his writings and interviews have appeared in newspapers, journals, and contemporary art publications.

Nurettin Erkan currently lives and works in Madison, Wisconsin.