Çallı returned to his hometown

Emrah KOLUKISA

The heat in Denizli is something else entirely… Prof. Dr. Celal Şimşek, head of the ongoing archaeological excavations in the ancient city of Laodikeia, expresses this heat in his characteristically witty style: “Archaeologists generally prefer to excavate cities by the sea, but here we chose to play backgammon with the demons of hell.” Now you can understand the heat.

Denizli experienced a weekend where art and archaeology intertwined. The exhibition, "Çallı in Çal on His Birthday," which met with art lovers in Çal, was the first leg of İş Bankası's "Art for Everyone: Anatolian Exhibitions" project, launched with the aim of bringing art to Anatolia. This mini-exhibition, featuring six works from İş Bankası's collection (one of which was "Woman Smelling Roses"), was displayed at the İş Bankası Çal branch and was open to the district's residents. It provided a refreshing respite from the extreme heat, while those who enjoyed sharing the same atmosphere with İbrahim Çallı, who was born in this town (now a district, of course) 143 years ago, on July 13, 1882, perhaps experienced seeing the works of this most celebrated Turkish painter for the first time.

HE GAVE HIS NAME TO A GENERATION

As Prof. Dr. Gül İrepoğlu, the founding curator of the İş Bankası Painting and Sculpture Museum and one of our country's leading art historians, emphasizes, İbrahim Çallı, who gave his name to the 1914 Generation, took his surname from the town where he was born and raised. İrepoğlu describes him as follows: “He was such a talented and lively person that he painted in every subject; he wasn't just a landscape painter, not just a painter of figurative compositions or still lifes; he had it all; all of them were tinged with Çallı's colors. Çallı is a personality we now define as charismatic. Thanks to his paintings, which embody wonderfully poetic colors, the 1914 Generation became more widely known and became known as the Çallı Generation.”

We mentioned earlier in this post that it would be a weekend where art and archaeology intertwined, and indeed, after the Çal exhibition, we traveled to the ancient city of Laodikeia, 6 km from Denizli. That journey will be the subject of another post.