İsmail Yıldırım at Sevgi Sanat Galerisi, Ankara: A Paris-Based Painter’s 27 Canvases Come Home

Some exhibitions arrive with a manifesto; others simply open the door and hang the paintings. The İsmail Yıldırım painting exhibition at Sevgi Sanat Galerisi in Ankara, running from 23 October to 7 November 2026, belongs firmly to the second kind. The gallery has published 27 images, a biography and a date for the opening cocktail — and very little else. For a painter who has spent most of his working life in a Paris studio, that restraint lets the canvases speak first.

From Beyşehir to Paris

According to the gallery, İsmail Yıldırım was born in 1954 in Beyşehir, in the province of Konya, and completed the painting seminar at the Çapa Teachers’ School (Çapa Öğretmen Okulu). He settled in Paris in the early 1980s and has worked mainly from his studio there ever since.

His biography lists exhibitions across the United States, Europe and the Middle East, and notes that his paintings and sculptures are held in museum and private collections. That combination — a Turkish formation and decades of practice in France — is shared by a number of painters of his generation, for whom Paris remained a natural centre long after New York became the art world’s commercial capital.

What the exhibition contains

The official exhibition page shows 27 works, numbered rather than titled (001 to 027). The gallery has not published titles, dates or media, so we will not guess at them. What the captions do reveal is the scale of the show:

• Three large canvases of 130 × 97 cm, the biggest works in the exhibition.
• A core of mid-sized paintings at 100 × 81, 100 × 73 and 92 × 73 cm — standard French figure formats, a small but telling sign of where the work is made.
• Smaller pieces down to 35 × 27 cm, the kind of format in which a painter’s handling is often most direct.

Twenty-seven works is a substantial number for a gallery of this size, and suggests something close to a survey of recent production rather than a tightly edited series. Visitors who want to know more about individual works — media, dates or availability — should ask the gallery directly.

How to look at an exhibition without a press release

Without a curatorial text to steer you, the paintings ask for a different kind of attention. Look for recurring motifs across the 27 canvases; compare how the artist treats space in the large formats and in the small ones; notice whether colour or line carries the composition. Exhibitions like this are a chance to form your own reading before anyone tells you what to think — and to ask the artist or gallerist questions at the opening.

Sevgi Sanat Galerisi and Ankara’s gallery scene

Sevgi Sanat Galerisi is a commercial gallery in Çankaya, one of the central districts of the capital. This exhibition joins several other October openings across the city, making late October a good moment for a gallery tour of Çankaya.

Why it matters

For Ankara collectors, the show is an opportunity to see a large group of works by a painter who is based abroad and therefore exhibited less often in Turkey. For younger painters, it offers a look at the output of an artist who has sustained a studio practice for more than four decades. And for the city, it is another sign that Ankara’s galleries are bringing internationally active Turkish artists back into conversation with a home audience.

Visiting information

Sevgi Sanat Galerisi, Hilal Mahallesi, 673. Sokak No: 21/A, 06550 Çankaya, Ankara. 23 October – 7 November 2026. Opening cocktail: Friday 23 October, 18:00–20:00. Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11:00–19:00. Telephone +90 535 636 03 39, email [email protected].

See the official exhibition page and the gallery’s website, our exhibition listing, and more Ankara and Istanbul openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.