Forty years of one face: İyem
Nuri İyem painted the same woman's portrait hundreds of times. That was a method, not a repetition.
Nadide Editör · 30 July 2026
İyem's portraits of Anatolian women are the most repeated image in Turkish painting. In a catalogue that looks like a problem: the same composition, the same gaze, different dates.
It is not. Each canvas is a correction of the last — the eye a little higher, the forehead a little wider, the ground a shade darker. Not a series, a study.
This matters for price history too: two portraits are not the same work because they look alike, and merging them turns two separate histories into one wrong chart.