Gencay's Italian chapter: a passage of becoming

Official URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003657279-9

This chapter focuses on the Turkish artist Gencay Kasapçı (1933–2017) whose formative years were spent in Italy during the years 1958–1966. In these years, she studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence on an Italian state scholarship, then moved to Rome and became an active member of a transnational group of avant-garde artists. Her work was shown in Venice at the Il Cavallino Gallery, in Milan at the Cadario Gallery, and in Rome, at the Zero Avantgarde exhibition in 1966 at Il Segno Gallery alongside Abe Nobuya, her teacher, and Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, Günter Uecker, Piero Manzoni, Otto Piene and others. She received prizes at the International Premio Gubbio painting and drawing competitions and worked as an illustrator for Mondadori and Vallecchi publications. The primary aim of this chapter is to trace Gencay Kasapçı’s presence within a transnational network of artists active in Italy in the 1960s, and how the artistic milieu of the Italian avant-garde reflected upon her work after her education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Istanbul. Coming from a place where abstraction and abstract symbolism carry historical weight, her work opens questions in relation to languages of abstraction and the deliberate confrontation of hierarchical divisions of art and craft.