Lot 74: Ferruh Basaga (Turkish, b. 1914)

Ferruh Basaga (Turkish, b. 1914)
The Red Doves
signed 'BASAGA' (lower right)
oil on canvas
58¾ x 66½in. (149 x 169cm.)
Painted circa 1980s

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION
This lot offered for sale is subject to a 5% import duty on the importation value levied at the time of collection/shipment within the UAE.
The Red Doves is one of Ferruh Basaga's most impressive works. The motif, a pair of confronted doves, is a potent symbol of peace and was to reappear many times in Basaga's work, but rarely with such monumental power.

Ferruh Basaga was born in the Balkans in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War. Yet again was world war to disrupt his life greatly from 1939-45, when it barred him the chance to study in Western Europe. Basaga's yearning for peace and tranquility likely stems from those two cataclysmic events.

Working first in a constructivist style, developed in the late 1940s, Basaga was to develop in the 1970s Basaga his signature geometric abstract style, with intersecting triangles dividing his compositions into facets. These works were undoubtedly influenced by his work in stained glass and mosaics, which he produced simultaneously.

For Ferruh Basaga, geometry represents infinity. In his crystalline world lines extend beyond the picture plane, forms extend beyond the visible. Geometry is fundamental and intrinsic to much of world art history, from the triangles of Bablyonian, Egyptian and Aztec pyramids and of Pythagoras, to the cubic form of the Kaaba, and the Golden section of the Greeks. Triangular forms recur through Turkish Seljuq and Ottoman art, in the decoration of the wooden minbars (pulpits) and dazzling murqanas (stalagtite vaulting) around domes and portals.

Basaga's paintings are multilayered, built up through a process of painting and erasing several times over, resulting in unusual depth and subletly of colour. The degrees of saturation give an impression of an almost breathable space within the picture plane, of a weighless and tranparent world of light and colour.