“I want to make china plates that will be used at the houses of the poor … and coffee cups for traditional coffeehouses. I want what I make to be [everywhere], in houses rich or poor, beautiful or ugly, in old and young hands.” So said Fureya Koral, often called Turkey’s first female ceramicist, in an interview with Milliyet Sanat in 1993, four years before her death. “Art should not be imprisoned in museums. That would kill it.”

Although these words became the signature of the aristocrat who wanted to make ceramics for the poor, her wish went unfulfilled. Fureya’s work — tiles, plates, ceramic-framed mirrors and ceramic-top tables — have essentially remained collector’s items. In 1973, she collaborated with the Istanbul Porcelain Factory to launch a tableware set signed “Fureya,” as she was called on the art scene, but the line was discontinued within a year after a limited production run. The factory was never able to produce the creamy white the artist demanded. 

Today, this pioneering artist is being recognized with the “Fureya Koral Retrospective Exhibition” at Siraevler 16, the maze-like art space in Istanbul’s chic Besiktas district. Sponsored by Kale Industries, this largest-ever show on her life and work consists of 200 pieces of art, documents and photographs and marks the 20th year of the artist's death and the 60th anniversary of Kale, the owner of Canakkale Ceramics, a tile and ceramics company. 

Curators Karoly Aliotti, Nilufer Sasmazer and Farah Aksoy emphasize that the exhibition focuses more on Fureya’s art than her stormy life. That said, it is Fureya’s multicultural life and her artistic family that inspired her style, combining Turkish mores with Western art, as in her ability to take traditional hues of Turkish ceramics and reinterpret them in designs vaguely recalling Vincent Van Gogh's “Starry Night.”