He then worked for the Fine Arts Faculty of Yeditepe University (2001-2003) as a lecturer. Curator Dan Cameron, who has championed the painter, orients him in a tradition of sexually explicit art stemming from Robert Mapplethorpe to Jeff Koons, but points out that the implicit argument of Celyan's work is 'a romantic arguing for the wholesomeness of gay male sexuality.”Īlthough born in Germany, Ceylan lives and works in Istanbul, where he studied painting at Mimar Sinan University (1986-1991).
Although Ceylan has suffered a significant amount of cultural backlash against his sexual orientation and provocative creative vision of nudity, eroticism and sexual intercourse, his career continues to sky-rocket as critics and art collectors recognize the impressive technical skill and intense emotional realism of his work. 1967, portrait above) is a Turkish hyper-realist painter who was one of the first artists to embrace homoerotic subject matter in popular Turkish art in the late 1980s.
