Guide
IMOGA in Küçük Çamlıca is a museum of printmaking — a rare thing, as the institution itself notes — and it grew out of one artist's workshop rather than a collecting policy. Süleyman Saim Tekcan, who set up printmaking workshops and started the teaching of the subject at many Turkish universities, opened his first private studio on Aralık Sokak in Kadıköy in 1974, meaning it only for his own engraving and screenprinting. He built the equipment himself — the press, the screenprinting machine, the drying racks — working from designs he brought back from Germany, and the result was, according to the museum, the only privately owned studio in the country with that technical range.
That is what turned it outward. Tekcan began sharing the studio with other artists; Nurullah Berk was the first to print there, followed by Gündüz Gölönü and others. In June 1977 the studio moved to larger premises at Söğütlüçeşme, where the wider space brought wider printing possibilities and, with them, the idea of a meeting place — somewhere art was argued about as well as made. By the end of the 1970s it had become exactly that, and leading figures of Turkish art worked there while the talk went on: among them Cihat Burak, Avni Arbaş and Emin Barın, with Nedim Günsür, Elif Naci and Zühtü Müridoğlu, and Erol Akyavaş, Devrim Erbil and Mehmet Güleryüz. Writers and public intellectuals joined the conversations too. Many of the artists learned printmaking from Tekcan himself, who worked beside each of them and, by his own account of it, spent much of his effort persuading people unfamiliar with the medium that they could do it.
The foundations of IMOGA were laid in 1982, when Tekcan set out to build something larger than a studio: an art house of international scale. The painter and architect Cihat Burak took on the design, the building was finished in 1984, and it opened on 13 October that year, as Artess Çamlıca Sanat Evi, before an audience of more than a thousand.
