At the Water’s Edge – The Life and Art of Halil Pasa – Pera Museum

Curator: Ozlem Inay Erten

At the Water’s Edge: The Life and Art of Halil Pasa focuses on the life and artistic production of Halil Pasa (b. 1852 – d. 1939), who played an important role in the transformation of painting from the Ottoman era to the Republic; who, as a painter of military background, brought together academic discipline with Impressionist sensibility and pioneered the formation of the plein-air painting tradition in Turkey. The exhibition offers comprehensive content on Halil Pasa, one of the pioneers of Western-style painting in Turkey, ranging from the unknown details of his life to his art education, from his understanding of light and color to his drawings, from his mastery in landscape and portrait painting to his works produced in different geographies.

Tracing the process that encompasses Halil Pasa’s education in the 1880s at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, one of the most important art institutions of the period in Paris, his national and international successes, his life at the seaside mansion of his father Ferik Selim Pasa in Beylerbeyi, Istanbul, the years he spent in Egypt as a guest of Abbas Halim Pasa, and his works in different geographies, the exhibition addresses the artist’s forms of artistic expression shaped by the cities in which he lived from a chronological perspective, through different themes such as portrait, still life and landscape.

This visual journey embracing the shores of the Istanbul Bosphorus, the Paris Salon exhibitions and the golden tones of Cairo takes on a documentary character with works borrowed from various institutional and private collections, along with Ottoman and Republican-era archival documents, news that appeared in the press, letters, personal belongings from the artist’s family archive, photographs, and sketchbooks.

The exhibition aims to reintroduce to today’s audience not only Halil Pasa’s contributions to the art of painting, but also the aesthetic bridge he built between East and West, his role in the Ottoman modernization process, his artistic work during the early Republican period, and his identity as an intellectual.

Curated by Dr. Ozlem Inay Erten, At the Water’s Edge: The Life and Art of Halil Pasa, together with the comprehensive publication Erten wrote for the exhibition, provides the opportunity to examine in full detail the life of Halil Pasa, one of the important figures of Turkish art history, while offering a testimony to the period stretching from the Ottoman era to the Republic.