Forms That Endure
Sometimes Istanbul slows down just enough to let something big sink in. This week, I felt it happen twice—once in a museum, once on a hillside. One experience was loud and monumental, full of raw forms and psychic noise; the other was quiet, wide open, and wind-blown. But both lingered in the same part of me. I hadn’t expected to be so shaken by Georg Baselitz’s exhibition at Sakıp Sabancı Museum, but it hit like a thunderclap—then, a few days later, I found myself decompressing with a long, peaceful walk up to the walls of Rumeli Hisarı. These two places couldn’t be more different, yet they both offered something I needed: a place to face the past and feel time differently.
Georg Baselitz: The Last Decade at Sakıp Sabancı Museum
September 13, 2024 – March 16, 2025
Sometimes you walk into an exhibition so monumental in scale and weight that it recalibrates your sense of time. Georg Baselitz: The Last Decade at Sakıp Sabancı Museum did that for me. From the first room, I felt I was stepping into the restless mind of an artist still grappling—furiously—with history, memory, and form, even in his eighties.
This is not a retrospective in the traditional sense. It’s more like a reckoning. Nearly one hundred recent works—towering sculptures and vivid canvases—fill every inch of the museum’s galleries and spill into the garden. Baselitz’s now-iconic inversions are everywhere, most powerfully in his upside-down portraits of his wife Elke and in the recurring symbols of eagles, deer, and disembodied golden hands. These motifs echo across decades but feel urgent here, not nostalgic.
One striking section features the Springtime series from 2020, inspired by Hannah Höch. These works are strange, bold, and unapologetically uncomfortable—Baselitz collages nylon stockings onto his figures, teasing out themes of eroticism, distortion, and artifice. Elsewhere, the carved wooden figures—like his BDM Group—stand imposingly, their rough surfaces carrying a physical tension I found almost unbearable. They’re not exactly about beauty. They’re about endurance, about what survives and what becomes grotesque through survival.
The exhibition continues at Akbank Sanat with Baselitz’s engravings, which gave me a quieter moment to reflect on his line and structure. But it was the Sakıp Sabancı Museum installation that stayed with me—the feeling of walking through a storm of symbols, of being reminded how deeply an artist can wrestle with the past and still make something completely alive.
Address: Sakıp Sabancı Museum,
Emirgan, Sakıp Sabancı Cd. No:42, 34467 Sarıyer/İstanbul, Türkiye
The Walls of Rumeli Hisarı
One morning, I took a slow walk up to Rumeli Hisarı, the medieval fortress on the European shore of the Bosphorus. It’s quieter this time of year, and the views from the top towers are worth every step. You can see all the way to the bridge and feel the wind off the water. I brought a thermos of tea and sat with my back against the stone, just watching the ships pass.
Address: Yahya Kemal Cd. No:42, Sarıyer
There’s something about seeing bodies—stone, wood, or your own—hold history. In Baselitz’s carved figures and distorted canvases, and in the fortress stones of Rumeli Hisarı, I felt that same pressure and presence. Istanbul is full of beauty, yes, but also full of weight. And some weeks, like this one, you feel all of it at once. I left the museum unsettled but alive, and I left the hilltop fortress just watching the ships pass, letting everything settle inside me.
Why Turkiye? 
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