FovArt Gallery
Field of view!

He was born in Istanbul in 1962. He graduated from the Painting Department of Mimar Sinan University, where he studied in the studio of Özdemir Altan. His drawings began to appear in humor magazines in 1982. Following his work for the Atmaca supplement of Ses magazine, he contributed to publications such as Çarşaf and Gırgır, and in 1985 became part of the founding team of Limon magazine, where he started creating short, wordless graphic stories. These later evolved to include brief texts alongside the drawings. Tuncer Erdem continued similar work in the humor magazines Nankör and Deli, which were published after Limon.

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From the 1990s onward, he increasingly focused on literature, writing poetry, short stories, and novels. In his works, drawing and text sometimes coexist and at other times stand independently.

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His illustrated stories with text have been published in magazines such as Express, Roll, 1+1, Kitap-lık, Sanat Dünyamız, Deniz Mecmuası, and Öküz. Some of his works have also appeared internationally in magazines including Frigidaire, Tic, and Levende Billede.

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Books
Novel:

• Şehrin Ilık Solukları (YKY, 1996)

• Bozkır Kitabı (YKY, 2008)

• Uzak Kış, Kayıp Güz (YKY, 2015)

• Kaz Düşü (YKY, 2019).

Short Stories:

• Denizlerimizde Rüzgâr (YKY, 2007)

• Güzel Eşya, Alelade Dünya (YKY, 2013)

• bak, gene o şey (YKY, 2014)

• Ben, Bozkır Yeli (YKY, 2022)

• Kötü Tabiat, İyi Doğa (YKY, 2023)

Poetry:

• Sulardan Kırlara Kuşlar [Seyrin Seksen Hali] (Kül Sanat, 2009)

• Uzak Diyarlar, Gidilmez Kentler (Kırmızı Kedi, 2019)

Graphic Novel:

• Tuncer Erdem (Joker, 1991)

• Hayalifener (YKY, 2007)

• İstanbul: Zamanın Suya İzi (YKY, 2009)

• Kar, Kömür, Keder (YKY, 2011)

• Gece Kitabı (Metin: Bilge Karasu; Metis, 2012)

• Gece Gelen Öyküler (YKY, 2017)

• Ölüm Gölgesinde Suretler (Kırmızı Kedi, 2019)

Awards:

• 2023 Sabahattin Kudret Aksal Yazın Ödülü (Ben, Bozkır Yeli)

• 2024 Haldun Taner Öykü Ödülü (Kötü Tabiat, İyi Doğa) 

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Cultural Records of Moments When the Image Becomes Text:

Notes on Tuncer Erdem

There are rare intersections in which an image becomes a text and entrusts itself to words. Tuncer Erdem is a farmer-writer who gathers memories of the world through both means and offers them back to the people of that same world. His cultivation rests on experiencing culture as both a sensory and an intellectual act. What he sees, he describes through both line and letter. His stories, novels, and drawings resemble closed-eye dreams that begin suddenly and leave the viewer in grainy awakenings. The images of these stories are sometimes black and white; at other times they clothe themselves in modest colors.

The adult narrative panels or “storyboards” — of the kind the West labels as graphic novels — expand the fertile distance Erdem establishes with the world. The short sentences in his stories and novels are only as brief as they appear; many of them possess the alertness of hunter-gatherers, casting lines of meaning deep beneath the surface.

Concerned with emptiness through empathetic patience, granting silence its right within narrative both visually and verbally, and observing all expressive intervals between black and white through a dialectical experimentalism, Erdem’s works, when viewed through an art-historical lens, stand close to creators inclined toward multidisciplinary production. A. Pushkin, F. Kafka, H. Hesse, J. Kerouac, G. Grass, C. Bukowski, V. Hugo, S. Plath, F. G. Lorca, T. Williams, H. Miller, R. Tagore, and e. e. Cummings belong among those writers in whom this necessity was recorded. Within this framework, Erdem’s hybrid plastic and literary practice may also be classified alongside Turkish creators who brought writing and image into rendezvous within their works — such as C. Burak, B. R. Eyüboğlu, İ. Berk, Komet, and likewise S. Berksoy and O. Pamuk — artists marked by transmission, generation, and sincerity.

The realism of Erdem’s texts and images emerges from an intense and meticulous accumulation. He gathers the sincerity of his lines from words and returns it as a gift to the visual realm. In doing so, he never deprives the reader of the right to imagine. The descriptive inclination of his stories and novelistic sentences stems precisely from this. Up to a certain point, the responsibility of the “indicated” moment and narrative is generously entrusted to the reader’s own intimate translation — formed through memory and personal world — within a silent request for trust.

In Erdem’s drawings, the metaphysical flexibility and uniqueness of the produced “moment” and “narrative,” together with the unrepeatable and naive quality of what is conveyed, reveal a precious demand for sincerity that holds hands with a mortal melancholy — a characteristic continuity within his practice.

This quality also brings the cultural roots of Erdem’s imagery closer to early Far Eastern philosophical image-texts, to the intimacy and egalitarian spirit of Ottoman-Turkish miniature painting, and to the voluntary anti-academic oath of Art Brut. The social and natural visual “faces” he selects for his stories and novels transform into personal bookmarks, provocatively placed among texts to awaken the reader’s curiosity.

Erdem’s labor may also be experienced as that of a composer of narrative. His plural production — both in quality and quantity — recalls jazz compositions archived as points of departure, or the emotional and tonal gradations of Italian classical musical terms such as adagio, allegro, presto, and largo, which nourish the wider musical canon, particularly within chamber music traditions.

The relative brevity of his texts and images is precisely what welcomes the richness of the dense, dream-laden bouquet of narratives that his books ultimately produce.

The archival nostalgia carried by all the colored and colorless images within Erdem’s predominantly black-and-white albums and books becomes a precious envelope reinforcing this sense of infinity — sent repeatedly, with sincere hope, to the reader, to history, and most importantly, to all forms of existence sustained by imagination.

Evrim Altuğ (AICA)
February ’22, ’26

(1, 2)
https://lithub.com/10-of-the-best-author-turned-artists-ranked/
https://www.abebooks.com/art/authors-who-painted/

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“BIRDS IN LITERATURE” -  Exhibition

This series brings together a collection of original drawings created in collaboration with Kırmızı Kedi Publishing House for the 2020 agenda project. Each bird is paired with a carefully selected literary quotation, allowing word and image to meet within a shared poetic space. Comprising 52 works in total, the series unfolds as a contemplative dialogue between literature and visual art, where every piece carries its own story while contributing to a larger, interconnected narrative.

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