Gültekin Bilge is the Founder Artist of the Gültekin Bilge Art Foundation and an internationally exhibited artist whose life and work are deeply interconnected. Born in Cyprus,1945 into a post-war environment shaped by ethnic conflict under British colonial rule, he experienced displacement, war, and loss at a formative age. After graduating with a Master’s degree in Fine Art from the İstanbul Devlet Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi in 1972, his life was profoundly altered during the 1974 Cyprus war when his family became refugees and he was shot in the right hand. Although the hand was saved through extensive surgery, he lost fine motor skills and was unable to paint for many years.
A school teacher for three decades, Gültekin taught art, photography, theatre, pantomime, and woodworking, while gradually regaining the use of his hand through physiotherapy. Following retirement in 2005, he returned to painting full-time. After re-establishing his practice at his atelier in the Büyük Han, Lefkoşa, a pivotal turning point came in 2009. He relocated to Barrhead, Scotland in 2011, where he produced over 300 paintings and sculptures. His work explores themes including concealment, social masks, ideological conditioning, blindness, “sleepwalking,” transformation, hidden energy, quantum reality, infinity, chaos, and humanity’s relationship with nature.
As a Trustee of the Foundation, Gültekin is the creative source and artistic vision at the heart of the organisation. He brings a lived example of resilience and transformation, and a deeply held belief in art as a language, an essential means of expression when words are insufficient. His work is driven by a profound respect for nature as a creative force and by a conviction that humanity must awaken to the unseen forces shaping our lives. He often states, “I don’t paint to make the wall beautiful; I paint because I have something to say.” While not drawn to formal public roles, he is most compelling when engaging directly with others through his work, offering insight, reflection, and challenge. He embodies the Foundation’s core principle that art exists not to decorate, but to communicate something essential.
Statement
The mother thought or central concept of my work is concealment. My artworks point towards what is hidden and question why this happens.
Nobody can know all that is inside another person. I see that human beings hide or partially mask their thoughts, feelings and motivations, even in many cases from themself. I observe that human relationships are not open and there are many hidden agendas in personal, social and political life. I came to understand this psychology by watching the decisions, behaviours and actions of individual people around me and of the political actions of nation states.
When I look to nature, all my life I could see expressive faces hidden in the trees, rocks, stones, pebbles, waterfalls, rivers and clouds. My idea is that faces hidden in nature are a metaphor for the way humans hide their thoughts, feelings and motivations.
In my art I join these two observations to show that many things in human society are obscured. I achieve this by concealing many abstract faces inside the colours and textures of my works in the same way that I see these faces hidden in nature. Of course, many people do not see these hidden portraits in my paintings in the same way that they don’t see them in nature. I want to show that most people only notice superficial aspects of external reality and question why so many people do not perceive what is happening below the surface. Most people don’t recognise that much goes on in a secret dialogue, behind closed doors or beneath the veil. In my artworks I explore the reasons for this hiding from deeper reality. I question why people are content to sleepwalk through life, blind to what is happening around them. I want my paintings to help people wake up from the effects of social conditioning and brainwashing so that they can see what’s really going on in the world.