Süleyman Saim Tekcan

Süleyman Saim Tekcan died on 18 October 2026, aged 86. His family announced the news on his social media account, writing that they were sharing with deep sorrow the passing of their beloved father, a great master of Turkish art. The cause and place of death have not been made public.

Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism published a message of condolence calling him the master of Turkish painting and original printmaking. His funeral prayer is to be held after the afternoon prayer on Monday 19 October 2026 at the Marmara University Faculty of Theology Mosque in Istanbul, followed by burial in the Mahmut Şevket Paşa family cemetery.

Süleyman Saim Tekcan was born on 6 October 1940 in Trabzon, Turkey, into a large family. His father, Mehmet Temel Tekcan, known locally as Hoca Temel Efendi, was a mosque imam who also worked as a scribe, a role he compared to a lawyer of the time. Tekcan remembered going with his father to recite the mevlid and to pray in mosques. His father's mother, a Circassian woman named Lale Sümbül, later gave her name to his best known public sculpture.

His father died early, and his mother, a housewife, wanted her children to earn a living as soon as possible. He finished the middle school of Trabzon High School with good results and hoped to continue to high school, but his mother asked him to enrol at a teacher training school instead. He later recalled wearing the same suit for three years. He described his first contact with art as shaping sculptures from mud in rain filled holes in the ground, and he credited the free schools of the young Republic, and teachers such as Asiye Hanım and Zihni Karsan, with shaping him.

Tekcan planned to become a physical education teacher, but appendicitis shortly before the exam changed his course. He sat the painting exam instead, was the only candidate selected in the preliminary round in Trabzon, and in 1958 entered the Painting and Crafts Department (Resim-İş) of the Gazi Education Institute in Ankara. His teachers there included Refik Epikman, Şinasi Barutçu and Veysel Erüstün, from whom he gained a deep knowledge of engraving. He graduated in 1961.

In 1970 and 1971 he carried out research on printmaking education at academies in Germany, including work in Munich. He later completed a degree in the Painting Department of the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, the institution that became Mimar Sinan University, and earned the Proficiency in Art qualification, equivalent to a doctorate, from its Faculty of Fine Arts.

While doing military service as a reserve officer, Tekcan founded an amateur theatre club in Trabzon and played the lead in a production of Zafer Madalyası. Without his knowledge, his photographs were sent to Ses magazine's cover star competition, where he came second behind Tunç Okan. The result opened the door to cinema.

In the mid 1960s he appeared in Çiçekçi Kız, Sevgim ve Gururum and Sevgili Öğretmenim, and in Metin Erksan's Sevmek Zamanı (Time to Love, 1965), the story of a man who falls in love with a woman's portrait rather than the woman herself. Tekcan played Başar, the jealous husband remembered as the film's bad lover. He later argued that Erksan never saw Başar as a villain but as a hesitant, regretful man. The film became a cult classic of Turkish cinema.

Tekcan said he received thousands of fan letters but earned little from film, so he kept working as an assistant principal at Işık High School and then left cinema for education. He and Erksan remained lifelong friends, and as a dean he brought Erksan in to teach cinema at Mimar Sinan and later at Işık University.

After graduating in 1961 Tekcan taught at the Artvin Teacher Training School, and from 1964 at the Erzurum Yavuz Selim Teacher Training School. From 1966 to 1968 he taught at the Trabzon Teacher Training School, and with his wife and siblings he founded Gülbahar Kindergarten, which IMOGA describes as the first private educational institution in Trabzon.

In 1968, aged 28, he was chosen by his former teacher Şinasi Barutçu to set up graphic studios at the Istanbul Atatürk Education Institute, where he founded its first printmaking, lithography, screen printing and etching studios and worked until 1975. He also helped establish etching and screen printing studios at institutions across Anatolia and, in 1974 and 1975, at Istanbul Technical University. In 1974 he opened his own printmaking studio in Kuyubaşı, building the etching press and screen printing equipment himself from drawings made in Germany. The studio moved to Söğütlüçeşme in 1977, and in 1984 he opened the Artess Çamlıca Art House.

At the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, later Mimar Sinan University, he founded the screen printing studio of the Graphic Department, became a professor and head of the Graphic Arts Department in 1985, and served as dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1994 and 1995. During those years he also worked for the creation of Anatolian Fine Arts High Schools. He was founding dean of the Yeditepe University Faculty of Fine Arts in 1996 and of the Işık University Faculty of Fine Arts in 2007, and he taught printmaking seminars at the Sarajevo Academy of Fine Arts and at Bilkent University.

In conventional printmaking each colour is printed and left to dry before the next is added. In the late 1970s Tekcan developed a wet printing method in which colours are printed in quick succession on several machines while the ink is still wet, so that the layers blend into intermediate tones. He said six colours gave him access to endless colours. The method came to be known in international printmaking literature as the Tekcan technique.

Horses were the central motif of his paintings, prints and bronzes. He argued that the human and the horse are the two creatures with golden ratio proportions, and that no empire could have been built without the horse. From the 1980s he combined horses with the abstract beauty of Ottoman calligraphy, in series such as Atlar ve Hatlar, and produced hand made, illuminated books including Süleymanname and Atname, written in Ottoman Turkish, Turkish and English. His 3.5 metre, 3.5 tonne bronze horse Lale Sümbül stands in Mecidiyeköy Square in Istanbul. Major exhibitions included shows in Washington and New York in 2004 and 2005, a 50th art year retrospective in 2011, and A Cyclical Odyssey (Döngüsel Seyir) at Tophane-i Amire in 2018.

For decades Tekcan opened his studios to fellow artists on a shared exchange: the studio covered the costs of printing, and artists left part of each edition behind, while plates and proofs were destroyed to protect the editions. The result was a collection of around 25,000 works by Turkish and international printmakers.

In 2004 he founded IMOGA, the Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts, to house, archive and exhibit this collection. Although many people wanted it named after him, he refused, saying he had not done the work for his name. He described IMOGA as the first building constructed in the Republican era as a contemporary art museum. In 2008 he led the first International Printmaking Biennial project and chaired its jury, and he later served as founding and honorary chairman of the museum's board.

In the summer of 1967 Tekcan travelled to Istanbul to meet a woman whose small photograph his mother had shown him. He said he fell in love with the picture, much like the hero of Sevmek Zamanı, and found and married its owner. He married Emel Tekcan in January 1968. They had two daughters, Elvan and Eda, who both learned engraving from his old teacher Veysel Erüstün. Emel Tekcan later managed the studios he had built.

Tekcan described himself as someone who read and travelled widely, visiting museums and art schools around the world.

Tekcan believed an artist must have a recognisable identity. He said that if people looked at his painting and did not say it was Süleyman Saim Tekcan, then he was not himself, and that painting like Picasso or Matisse does not make anyone an artist. He took part in studio debates from the late 1970s about what Turkish art should be, and argued for building contemporary work on the cultures of Anatolia and on traditions such as calligraphy and miniature, without copying old masters.

He placed teaching above everything else he did, saying his role as an art educator came before even his art. He spoke of his gratitude to the free schools and teachers of the Republic founded by Atatürk, and argued that Turkish artists could only compete internationally if the country built major international museums.

Tekcan's honours included the Painting and Sculpture Museums Association Contemporary Artists Print Award (1982), an achievement award in the Viking Paper printmaking competition (1985), the grand prize for original printmaking at the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh (1986), the Prime Ministry Friendship and Peace Award in original printmaking at the Asia Europe Biennial in Turkey (1986), third prize in original printmaking at the 49th State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition (1988), second prize at the State Original Printmaking Exhibition (1992), and the Sanat Kurumu Artist of the Year award (1993).

On 21 December 2022 he received the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award in painting from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at a ceremony in Ankara. In 2024 he was named among the Yüzyılın Aydınlık Yüzleri (Bright Faces of the Century).

Tekcan is remembered as one of the founders of modern original printmaking in Turkey, as an educator who trained generations of artists, and as a builder of institutions: school studios across the country, faculties of fine arts at three universities, and IMOGA, one of the largest printmaking collections in the world. Artists who worked in or emerged from the academy's graphic studios helped give Turkish printmaking its own identity and won prizes at international biennials. On his death the Ministry of Culture and Tourism said his works, the artists he trained and the museum he founded had given the country lasting cultural value.