Mehmet Guleryuz

Mehmet Guleryuz was born in Istanbul in 1938. He completed secondary school at Saint Benoit French High School in Istanbul, then in 1958 entered the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, the institution now known as Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, graduating first in his class in 1966. Parallel to his art studies, he trained as an actor in Istanbul's actor studios and amateur theatres in the early 1960s and began a professional acting career at Arena Theater in 1963 under director Asaf Cigiltepe.

From 1970 to 1975 he specialized in high painting and lithography in Paris on a Turkish state scholarship, returning to Turkey afterward. Over the following decades he built a body of work shown in numerous solo exhibitions in Istanbul and Izmir, including Erkekler? in 2004, Cizgi Roman in 2006, Oradan Oraya in 2007, and Resepsiyon in 2008, and was honored with a 50th Year Retrospective at the Is Sanat Kazim Taskent Culture Center's Kibele Art Gallery in 2009. Istanbul Modern also mounted a retrospective of his work, referenced in a recorded 2015 artist talk. In his later years he maintained a Paris presence through Galerie Cyril Guernieri, which showed his work in 2018 and again in 2022.

Mehmet Guleryuz died in Paris on September 3, 2024, at the age of 86, following cancer treatment, as reported by ArtDog Istanbul, Bianet, and other Turkish press outlets.

Christie's has described Guleryuz as an influential figure in Turkish art who studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in the 1960s and later worked between Istanbul and Paris. His standing within Turkey is reflected in a long sequence of institutional recognitions, including a first-place graduation prize in 1966, the Sedat Simavi Foundation Award in 1979, and a Painter of the Year honor from the Istanbul Foundation of Education and Culture in 1990, culminating in retrospective exhibitions at major Istanbul venues including Istanbul Modern. No verbatim critical quotations from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed from available sources, so none are reproduced here.

Guleryuz's market has been built almost entirely through Turkish auction houses rather than international salerooms. Two documented sale results emerge from public reporting: Farmer (Ciftci), reported at TRY 230,000 through an Antik A.S. auction in Istanbul, and Matador, a 2008 painting reported at TRY 228,000 in a Turkish auction covered by Sabah in March 2021. Exact sale dates, and the auction house for the Matador sale, are not confirmed in the sources reviewed, so neither result can be certified as his definitive all-time auction record. His European gallery presence in the years before his death, through Galerie Cyril Guernieri in Paris, points to some secondary-market activity outside Turkey, though no comparable price data from that channel is confirmed.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Mehmet Guleryuz, and his sales history is spread across multiple Turkish auction houses with inconsistent public reporting of sale dates and currency conversions. Collectors should expect prices denominated in Turkish lira for most documented sales and should treat any single result with caution given how fragmented the record is. Current gallery representation for the estate is not clearly established; Galerie Cyril Guernieri in Paris is the most recently documented gallery relationship, but no formal estate representation has been confirmed. Given the absence of a catalogue raisonne, provenance and attribution should be verified directly through the artist's estate or through the auction houses that have historically handled his work.