Sema Çulam, who is one of the representatives of naive painting in Turkey and represented our country in multiple international organizations with many awards, is known for her work, which highlight the importance of nature, women and labour.
“Rising Sun” tells the figures of the artist completed with the nature, paintings cleansed with the light and hopes for the humankind.
Sema Çulam, who is working with an understanding of abstraction and abstractionism for years, after she has dropped out her art education, took on the naive painting understanding in early 2000s and placed nature and hardworking rural women in the centre of her work. The artist tries to tell the urban people a world belonging to us that we know but fail to perceive.
Naive artists are generally defined as artists, who do not have a conventional education, who produce according to their own instincts and interests rather than the problems of the art of painting, and who take them to an aesthetic level. In Turkey, there is also another name for naive artists: “pureheart”… Pureheart, for me, means more of a greater context.
The Purehearts are the artists, who set aside their knowledge and produce as their interests in a place, where little narratives are important. Therefore, I prefer calling the works of Sema Çulam as pureheart, because those paintings are works, which transmit a narrative language with understandable expressions.
Sema Çulam’s works are like the pages of a book. While watching, they tell the stories, which are near to the artist, to the audiences.
