Bedri Baykam
Bedri Baykam is a Turkish artist.
Early life
Baykam was born in Ankara, Turkey. Baykam's father, Suphi Baykam, was a deputy in the Turkish parliament, and his mother, Mutahhar Baykam, is an architectural engineer.Baykam studied at Sorbonne University in Paris from 1975 to 1980 and earned an MBA degree. During this time, he studied drama in L'Actorat, Paris. He lived in California from 1980 to 1987, studied painting and film-making at California College of Arts and Crafts, in Oakland. He returned to Turkey in 1987 to live in Istanbul.
Baykam played tennis throughout the 70s placing well at the Turkey Tennis Championships.
Career
He had solo exhibitions in many countries, in addition to participating in group shows.Author
As of 2018 he had authored eighteen books, five on art, and eleven on politics. Monkeys' Right to Paint, documents the plight of non-western artists and criticizes the western art establishment for its western-biased art history. Baykam wrote a controversial novel The Bone, published in December 2000. A turn of the Century novel it ranged through sex, death, philosophy of new sciences, technology and spying. The Bone was published in English in 2005.Baykam published a two volume autobiography. In it he claims that as a child he was seen as "the creator of the 21st century school of art". Baykam claims that he was compared to artists like Klee, Matisse, Dufy, Saul and Steinberg. He refers to this book as "The most detailed autobiography ever written on earth" and compares himself to Mozart.