ESMA
Esma Ekiz was born in Aluçra, Giresun. She married in 1938 and had seven children. The Ekiz family migrated to Samsun in 1947, where Esma Ekiz began working as a tobacco laborer. Despite economic hardship, she and her husband supported their four sons through university and encouraged each of them individually in becoming artists. After retiring from the tobacco factory in 1972, Ekiz secretly began to paint with the pastel and watercolor sets her sons had left behind, and soon continued painting tirelessly. Starting in 1986, her works were exhibited with the support of her sons and introduced to academic circles. Although her almost trance-like artistic production occasionally led to her being ostracized by those around her, she continued to paint nature, animals, and the children and adults she observed until her death in 1996. Her works were included in the 2021 exhibition “I–You–They: A Century of Artist Women,” curated by Deniz Artun at Meşher, which brought together the previously unseen works of nearly 170 women artists. Her pieces exploring abstraction through geometric repetition were later featured in Galeri Nev’s exhibition “Let Us Return Again,” organized in 2022 from the gallery’s own collection as a parallel event to the 17th Istanbul Biennial. Most recently, two of her works were shown in May at a meeting in Geneva organized by the European Outsider Art Association, which focuses on self-taught naïve artists whose practices developed outside the conventional art world.
SAURA
He began painting and writing in 1947 in Madrid when, suffering from tuberculosis, he was laid up for five years. This was his first foray into art and pictorial experiments. He took Arp and Tanguy as influences, yet his work already stood out thanks to his highly personal style. He produced numerous dreamlike and Surrealist drawings and paintings that usually depict imaginary landscapes and employ a very colourful palette in flat, smooth applications of paint. He made his first stay in Paris in 1952. During his second in the French capital in 1954 and 1955, he met Benjamin Péret and was part of the Surrealist circle, although he and his friend and fellow painter Simon Hantaï soon left the movement. He was using the technique of grattage, or scraping, and had adopted a gestural style along with a radically abstract and always colourful handling the paint that was organic in conception and based on chance. At this time he worked by taking over the space of the canvas in several very distinct ways, creating formal structures that are highly personal and which he would continue to develop in the ensuing years. Forms now appeared that would soon become archetypes of women’s bodies or the human face. These two fundamental themes would come to dominate the greater part of his output. In 1956 Saura embarked on a new range and level of work that would eventually form his major series, Ladies, Nudes, Self-portraits, Shrouds, and Crucifixions, executing these pieces on both canvas and paper. In 1957 in Madrid he founded the group El Paso, which he was to head until it broke up in 1960. He met Michel Tapié and had his first solo show at the Rodolphe Stadler Gallery (Paris), where he would regularly exhibit throughout his life. Stadler also introduced the painter to Otto van de Loo in Munich and Pierre Matisse in New York, both of whom were to represent Saura in the ensuing years. He chose to limit his palette to blacks, greys and browns, and asserted a personal style that was independent of the movements and trends marking his generation. His work followed in the tradition of Velázquez and Goya, and was soon hanging in the major museums. In 1959 Saura produced the first of a number of printed works; he indeed would prove quite a prolific printmaker over the years. He also illustrated numerous books in an original way, including Cervantes’s Don Quixote; Orwell’s 1984; Pinocho, Nöstlinger’s adaptation of the Pinocchio story; Kafka’s Tagebücher, Quevedo’s Trois visions; and many others. In 1960, he started working in sculpture, creating pieces that feature welded metal elements depicting the human face, figures and crucifixions. In 1967 he settled permanently in Paris and joined the opposition to the Franco dictatorship, having a say in numerous debates and controversies in politics, aesthetics and artmaking over the years. He broadened his thematic and pictorial range. Along with the Femmefauteuils (or Womenarmchairs), Saura created series of works such as Imaginary Portraits, Goya’s Dogs and Goya’s Imaginary Portraits. In 1971 he stopped painting on canvas (he would take it up again in 1979) to concentrate on writing, drawing and painting on paper. In 1977 he began publishing his writings and was involved in creating stage designs for theatre, ballet and opera. In 1983 he produced a new and important series of portraits called Dora Maar or Dora Maar Visited. From that year until his premature death in 1998, Saura returned to all his earlier themes and figures, and brilliantly developed them anew, producing perhaps the best part of his large body of work.
TING
Walasse Ting is a Chinese diaspora artist celebrated for his colourful and bright depictions of animals, flora and sultry women. He briefly studied at the Shanghai College of Fine Arts in the 1940s, before leaving for Paris in 1953 in his early 20s. There he became associated with artists belonging to the avant-garde group CoBrA. In 1957, he travelled to New York, where he befriended the American artist Sam Francis; here Ting became strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1964 he wrote One Cent Life, edited by Francis and published by E.W. Kornfeld, which involved collaborating with twenty-eight European and American Pop Art and Expressionist artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Joan Mitchell, and included sixty-two original lithographs. In 1977, he won the Guggenheim Fellowship Award for his drawings. His paintings during this period are filled with bold dripping brush strokes mixed with bright acrylic pigments, but by the 1970s, he began experimenting with figures, developing the distinctive style that we are so familiar with today. His paintings are a sheer testimony to love, life and beauty. His paintings of women, flowers, cats, fish, horses, and watermelons are often painted in a rich palette of bright acrylics on rice paper, layered with powerful effervescent brushstrokes in Chinese ink. He passed away in 2010. Alisan Fine Arts organised Ting’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong in 1986 and has since held 13 solo shows for him. Alisan's inaugural exhibition at our new gallery location in New York City in November 2023 celebrates a new chapter and the vibrant legacy of Walasse Ting, coinciding with Ting's first solo museum exhibition in the United States, Walasse Ting: Parrot Jungle, at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale. In 2016, the Musée Cernuschi in Paris also held the first large-scale retrospective exhibition of Ting's work in France. His works have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Chicago Institute of Art; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Tate Gallery, London; Musée Cernuschi, Paris; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai; Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taiwan; Hong Kong Museum of Art; M+, Hong Kong.
