If you missed YapıKredi’s exhibition, Işte Benim Zeki Muren last year, spare a few minutes for this small show at Mimar Sinan University about the non-musical offereings of Turkey’s Liberace. As well as a rare chance to get inside the marble halls of Zeki Muren’s alma mater on the Bosphorus, where he studied decorative arts from 1950 to 53, the exhibition offers an introduction to Zeki Muren’s less flamboyant side (it’s all relative) as a textile designer.
Zeki Muren famously designed his own costumes – some so heavy with sequins that he sometimes performed encores in a dressing gown – and a small selection is displayed here. The main interest of the show, however, are the water colour cartoons of textile designs that Muren made while a student and later. The later designs are abstract, while others beg to be turned into elegant curtains; all, however, are joyful and optimistic, with a canny use of colour. In the middle of the room is a rare example of a signed Zeki Muren carpet, adapted from a textile design.
Zeki Muren left his worldly possessions to the TEV (Turk Egitim Vakfi) and the Mehmetçik Vakfı (Foundation for Disabled Veterans and Families of the Martyrs), and the YapiKredi show came about after trunk upon trunk of photographs and designs were discovered in a basement of a building in Istanbul. Someone should turn these designs into wallpaper or textiles and
make sure that Zeki Muren’s artistic talents do not get forgotten again.
The exhibition runs from Dec 6-21 in the Mimar Sinan University Findikli Campus, in the garden and in the Osman Hamdi Bey Salonu.