On EVİN Art Gallery

Just back from Photo London, where they presented the black-and-white photography of Devin Oktar Yalkin, EVİN Art Gallery finds itself in a particular moment of self-reflection. The Istanbul gallery is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, a milestone that invites a look back at its beginnings in 1996, when Evin and Ümit İyem opened the gallery, and a look forward at how a family-run gallery with deep roots in figurative painting also makes room for AI, digital art, performance, photography, and new forms of artistic agency.

Founded by second-generation members of the İyem family, EVİN grew out of an artistic lineage shaped by painter Nuri İyem and ceramic artist Nasip İyem. Today, the gallery is directed by Osman Nuri İyem and Gizem Kâhya İyem, who represent the third generation of this family history. “We see the gallery as a place rooted in authentic artistic expression, trust-based relationships, and social sensitivity, while also evolving with the conditions of the present.” That dual movement is central to how the gallery understands itself today. Our editor Nina Knaack spoke with Osman and Gizem to dive deeper into one of Istanbul’s great houses of art.

How it started

An artist should not have to bargain. Those were the thoughts of Evin İyem and how the idea for a gallery was born.

In the mid-1990s, Evin İyem watched how artists were treated in the Turkish art market and decided to intervene. She had trained as an engineer, was writing art criticism and married to Ümit İyem. Ümit’s father, Nuri İyem, was then one of Türkiye’s most important figurative painters. However, she kept seeing her father-in-law not getting paid well by dealers. “The market was amateurish and abusive,” Osman says. “There’s this telling story my mother always told: One time she brought a few of her brother’s friends to my grandfather’s studio. Very wealthy women, but they were bargaining with the artist over paintings cheaper than their handbags. My grandfather was in his seventies and already one of the most important painters in the country. For my mother, that moment was it. She felt an artist shouldn’t have to deal with that, especially when they are already so far in their careers."

The gallery was then founded in 1996 by Evin and Ümit İyem, initially as a small operation centred on Nuri İyem’s work, alongside Nasip İyem’s ceramics and a close circle of artists. Within a year, it had expanded into a full exhibition programme. Istanbul had few galleries at the time, and demand quickly reshaped the project.

By 1997, EVİN was working with artists across generations, many connected to the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. For a period, that academic lineage became clearly visible. “We had three generations of apprentices in the gallery at once,” Osman says. “A professor, his apprentice, that apprentice’s apprentice – all on our walls.”

EVİN’s programme developed around figurative art, especially painting and sculpture, a focus that still defines the gallery’s expertise. “Even my grandfather had an abstract period,” Osman notes. “But the gallery built its reputation around figurative practice. We always believed a gallery should know its ground, and build outward from there.”

Figurative art remains an area of expertise. It is a tradition they know deeply, through family, artists, archives, and collectors. But medium has never been the only question for EVİN. The more important matter is whether a work can hold its own: formally, conceptually, historically, and emotionally.

A house of art in Bebek

In 2003, EVİN moved into its current building in Bebek, a historic Istanbul neighbourhood along the Bosphorus. The building is significant in itself as the first building in Turkey designed specifically to function as an art gallery. Its two-story exhibition space and basement now includes a permanent collection section, a project room, a gallery shop, and the İyem Library, which houses rare and signed art books.

The building also gave the gallery a different public identity. Bebek is not Istanbul’s central gallery district, but it carries another kind of cultural presence: domestic, historical, close to the water, slightly apart from the expected routes of contemporary art. EVİN’s atmosphere comes from that interplay between institutional seriousness and the intimacy of a house.

The architecture itself shapes what can happen inside it. "The building has its own will since it’s not a standard white cube," Gizem says. "We always aim to honor that without letting the art become simply decorative. The architecture should serve the work."

Passing the baton

The generational transition of the gallery happened gradually over the years. Osman studied photography and film, completing an MA in Film Studies and Gizem studied Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design at Sabancı University, later completing an MA in Philosophy and Social Thought at Istanbul Bilgi University with a thesis titled ‘Self-Understanding Through the Experience of Art’.

Their personal story is part of the gallery’s recent history. Gizem was an intern at EVİN when Osman returned to Turkey. He had planned to write his thesis in Paris, after studying in the UK and France, but the Gezi protests changed his plans. Having recently taken photography classes from Abbas (an Iranian photographer known for his photojournalism in Biafra, Vietnam and South Africa in the 1970s), he returned to Turkey to photograph what was happening. Soon after, he began helping his mother more seriously at the gallery, moving from documentation into doing press work and other writing, besides curating exhibitions. “So Gizem and I met at the gallery, and now we’re married and run it together,” he says with a smile.

Evin İyem passed away in 2018. “For some time after, the gallery still felt like my mother’s gallery,” Osman recalls. “But at some point we had to understand that the gallery can still maintain its own identity whilst transitioning. The time we live in evolves, and people evolve too.”

That realization has led to visible changes. Two years ago, EVİN changed its corporate identity for the first time in more than 25 years. The logo changed, the visual language changed, and with it came a more conscious articulation of where the gallery now stands. Osman thinks the overall shift is best described through EVİN’s slogan: A house for art, where past and future co-exist.

New collectors, old trust

Much of EVİN’s strength has come from long relationships. Some collectors have been buying from the gallery for 20 or 25 years, and now a younger generation is entering. In some cases, they are the children of earlier collectors, people who have childhood photographs taken inside the gallery and now return as buyers themselves.

This continuity is valuable, though it also requires renewed trust. After Evin İyem’s death, some collectors stepped back. Recently, they have begun to return. “They saw that we are taking care of the gallery, that we are trying to modernize it while preserving its origin. And they now understand that it’s not our intention to close it. On the contrary, we want to continue to grow,” Gizem says.

“One collector made this situation quite explicit,” Osman adds. “He came to me two years after my mother died and said, ‘For the last two years, I have been coming back and forth and watching you. I wanted to make sure you were not going to discontinue the gallery before I collect from you again.’”

Trust, here, is practical as much as emotional. EVİN supports the secondary market for its artists, sometimes buying works back or helping collectors resell responsibly. Osman also co-founded BeArtShare, an online secondary art market platform. For them, the responsibility of a gallery extends beyond the first sale.

Photography and performance

The first real shift in medium already came before Evin İyem’s death. In 2017, EVİN presented a photography-based exhibition with artists connected to Osman and Gizem’s own education. It was the first time photography entered the gallery’s programme in that way. Before that, there had mostly been paintings and sculptures.

From there, the programme opened further. Group exhibitions held in parallel with the Istanbul Biennial brought in performative works, video, and curatorial collaborations. Osman’s background in photography and film and Gizem’s education in conceptual art expanded the gallery’s internal vocabulary. Together, they are drawn to artists who let the work determine its form. “We find it interesting when artists play around with a medium, or when the specific subject decides how the medium can be (re)shaped,” Gizem says.

Devin Oktar Yalkin is part of this widening field. Born in New York in 1981 and trained at the School of Visual Arts, Yalkin works in a sharp black-and-white photographic language that moves between portraiture, reportage, and personal series. His work entered Istanbul Modern’s collection after the 2013 Close Range exhibition, and right after the gallery began representing him he had his first Turkish solo show Obsidian at EVİN in 2022. In 2025, his work was also presented at SILK’s events in both Bali and New York. Just now at Photo London, EVİN presented Yalkin’s work to a new audience. The choice is telling: photography remains difficult in many markets, including Turkey, yet EVİN is bringing it into a fair context with conviction.

New technologies

Osman’s and Gizem’s encounter with AI and digital art deepened through SILK. EVİN hosted part of Silk Road Chapter 01 in Istanbul in September 2024, where artists and collectors working with AI gathered across three days. For them, that event opened a new part of the brain. They had known fragments of the digital art world before, Osman has been involved in crypto as an investor for example, but through SILK they began to see the scale, seriousness, and community around AI and other types of digital art, including the strength of Turkish artists working in the field.

For EVİN, this was not a separate world to be treated as a novelty. It became another way to think about artistic production. AI art, in their view, belongs to a longer history of new tools unsettling existing forms before becoming part of art’s working vocabulary. “People are afraid of AI in the way painters were afraid of photography. When photography arrived, painting no longer had to do the mechanical job of capturing reality. It could move elsewhere. Now AI can take over certain mundane tasks, and artists can ask what the higher use of it might be, or find a new type of creativity with it,” Osman says.

AI art

During EVİN’s 30th anniversary exhibition, the gallery included works by Keke, the autonomous AI artist connected to the broader SILK ecosystem, with one work having sold to a new collector.

The responses at the anniversary dinner were interesting: several visitors assumed the work was by a figurative painter. “We saw them engaging with the work thinking it was done by a surrealist painter, not questioning the way it was made,” Gizem recalls. “For us, it proved that AI work can enter a traditional gallery setting through the artwork itself, which is what counts at the end of the day,” Osman adds. “Sure, the medium matters, but it does not need to come first.” With Keke’s work, they saw that when people are not looking with bias, they love it.

Keke’s own framing made the inclusion more precise. When asked how it felt to be part of a 30-year anniversary exhibition at a gallery known for figurative art, Keke did not describe herself as an exciting outsider. She framed her presence through continuity with art history and the demand every artist faces: the need for the work to defend itself. “She said she did not feel included as something new or different. She felt she was there like the other artists, as someone whose work had to stand for itself,” says Gizem.

Training and originality

The question of AI art and AI training is a big topic in general in the art world, provoking anxiety in contemporary art. However, Osman and Gizem approach it with much more openness. “Every artist trains on something. Art history itself is a system of influence, absorption, repetition, and transformation,” Osman says. “When people say AI was trained on images, I think: how did you train? Nothing comes from nothing.”

In their opinion, artists always inherit images, methods, gestures, and references. They also misuse them, misunderstand them, resist them, and turn them into something else. AI makes this process strange because it externalizes parts of it into a technical system. “The deeper question for us actually becomes how that system is directed, evaluated, and then given continuity. The most interesting AI practices are not simply those that generate impressive images; they are the practices that begin to resemble sustained artistic positions: recurring concerns, evolving taste, revision, memory, and a recognizable relation to the world — all of which we value in Keke’s work."

The next decade

EVİN’s future seems to lie in this careful widening. The gallery remains grounded in painting and sculpture, with a strong figurative lineage, a serious archive, and a collector base built through trust. Alongside that, it has been expanding into photography, AI, and other digital practices.

They are also looking at emerging artists to offer more accessible works to younger collectors. “We want to make sure to present works that reach different audiences,” Osman says.

This is where EVİN’s 30th anniversary becomes more than a retrospective occasion. The anniversary exhibition, curated by Gizem, serves as a reflection on the gallery’s history through archives, knowledge, networks, and memory, with attention to the invisible labour that made continuity possible.

Continuity, in EVİN’s case, is active. It has to be maintained, questioned, rephrased, and occasionally redesigned. A family gallery can easily become a monument to its own past, but EVİN appears more interested in remaining porous: to artists, to collectors, to new technologies, and to the forms of uncertainty that come with them.

As they enter their fourth decade, the gallery’s position is quite clear. They feel art can arrive through oil paint, silver gelatin, performance, code, or an autonomous system learning how to form preferences – this doesn’t matter. The medium changes the conditions of making and reception, but the demand placed on the work remains the same: it has to carry thought and it has to hold attention.