Bedri Baykan Bedri Baykam

Bedri Baykam — Biography

Bedri Baykam (born 26 April 1957 in Ankara) is a Turkish painter, writer, columnist and politician who has also worked as an actor and filmmaker. The son of CHP parliamentarian Dr. Suphi Baykam, he began painting at the age of two and was celebrated as a child prodigy after showing his work in Ankara, Bern and Geneva at six.

After attending the Pierre Loti French high school in Istanbul, he moved to Paris in 1975, studied business and economics at the Sorbonne, and took acting lessons at L'Actorat. From 1980 he lived in the United States, studying painting and film at the California College of Arts and Crafts, before settling in Istanbul in 1987. Regarded as a pioneer of Neo-Expressionism in Turkey, he is known for large-scale political works, multimedia installations and his '4D' pieces; his art has been shown at venues such as the Barcelona Picasso Museum and the Venice and Istanbul biennials.

Elected to the Republican People's Party assembly in 1995, he served three years and ran for the party leadership in 2003. He has published more than thirty books, and in 2015 was elected World President of the UNESCO-affiliated International Association of Art. He writes a column for the daily Cumhuriyet and survived a knife attack in 2011.