Hülya Vurnal İkizgül

Hülya Vurnal İkizgül — Biography

Hülya Vurnal İkizgül (born 1966 in Istanbul) is a Turkish mosaic artist, sculptor and ceramicist. After finishing Istanbul's Bahçelievler High School, she graduated from Marmara University's Faculty of Fine Arts in 1990, completed a graduate degree at the same faculty, and trained in the Mural Painting Workshop under Mustafa Pilevneli. In 1992 she held a Mosaic Painting and Sculpture Exhibition at the Hagia Sophia Museum's Ali Sami Boyer Gallery and completed a scholarly study titled "Mosaic Art and the Mosaics of Bedri Rahmi and Eren Eyüboğlu."

Her multicolored mosaic panels, assembled from hundreds of stones in varying sizes and colors, are often presented together with poetry and music to evoke a dreamlike world spanning antiquity to the present. In 1994 she was invited as a guest artist representing contemporary Turkish mosaic art at the Istres Archaeology Museum near Marseille, France, where three of her mosaic-concrete sculptures entered the museum's collection; that same year she received the Mediterranean Turkish-French Friendship Association award. She went on to exhibit at the Vakko Art Galleries in Istanbul and Ankara in 1996, held a workshop-accompanied exhibition as the inaugural guest of the "Atölye Günleri" series at Marmaris's Robinson Select Club Maris in 1997, and opened another Mosaic Painting and Sculpture Exhibition at the Darphane-i Amire (Imperial Mint) in Istanbul in 2002.

Her works are held in the collections of the Musée d'Archéologie d'Istres in France and the Balıkesir Devrim Erbil Art Museum in Turkey.