Carmen Turyn was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in the Western Transvaal, South Africa in 1936 and immigrated to London, where she enrolled at Goldsmiths College in 1969 to study for a BA in Painting and an Art Teachers’ Certificate. Graduating in 1974, she subsequently taught art for a living, including at Hammersmith Art College (1974-75), the Art Department of the Urdang School of Dance (1973, 1976), the Art and Remedial Department of Beaufoy School (1975-1981), the Spiro Institute (1994) and Millfield Art Centre (1994-1996). She has also exhibited regularly in the UK.
Painter Carmen Turyn was born in 1936 in a small gold-mining town in the Western Transvaal, South Africa. Her father, Henoch Papert, had emigrated from Lithuania, fleeing anti-Semitic pogroms. Aged 17 and not knowing the language, he travelled to the Kimberly to dig for diamonds and, as a result, was able to purchase several farms. Her mother had immigrated to South Africa aged two with the remnants of her Lithuanian family and, as an adult, she became a well-known singer. Turyn describes the area where she grew up as ‘a place of vast hypnotic space and magnificent landscape’ (Carmen Turyn, Artist website). The family lived a self-sufficient life: ‘The orchards bore fruit of many kinds, we grew our own vegetables and made butter and ice cream out of milk from the cows’ (Carmen Turyn, letter to Ben Uri). She recalls, ‘As a child, I loved playing with the San (Bushmen) children, making castles and animals from mud. Magical times were also spent alone in a room above our garage, drawing with coloured chalks on a small blackboard’ (Carmen Turyn, letter to Ben Uri). After finishing school, Turyn travelled to Cape Town, where, in her words, ‘ignoring Anti-Apartheid laws, I was rewarded by a short period in gaol’. She left South Africa as a young adult and immigrated to England, where she was briefly married to a journalist, before meeting painter, Adam Turyn, who became 'the centre of my life' until his death 25 years later (Carmen Turyn, letter to Ben Uri). In 1969 Turyn enrolled at Goldsmiths College in London (now part of the University of the Arts London), to study for a BA in Painting and an Art Teachers’ Certificate. She won the Thames & Hudson prize for her art history thesis as well as the Goldsmiths’ Prize and graduated in 1974. Afterwards she taught art at institutions including in London at Hammersmith Art College (1974-75), the Art Department of the Urdang School of Dance (1973, 1976), the Art and Remedial Department of Beaufoy School (1975-1981), the Spiro Institute (1994), and in Somerset at Millfield Art Centre (1994-96). She was awarded a Gestetner Award in 1982 and an Anglo-Jewish Grant in 1984. Turyn also spent time in Israel during the late 1980s and early 1990s, where she held a number of exhibitions and taught at Haifa University and the Tel Aviv Museum.
Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions in London, including at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1972, where she exhibited as part of the London Group, at the Mall Galleries and the ICA in 1973, at the Pauline Podbrey Gallery in Muswell Hill between 1985 and 1990 (where she was presented as an Israeli artist) and at the Zebra Gallery between 2007 and 2008. She has also exhibited at the British Museum (2011) and was a finalist of the Fourth International Jewish Artist of the Year (IJAYA) competition at Ben Uri Gallery in 2012. Turyn reflects that, ‘My work draws heavily from my childhood experiences’ (Carmen Turyn, letter to Ben Uri), explaining, ‘When, as a young adult, I immigrated to the United Kingdom, I had, like my Lithuanian parents before me, to reinvent myself in a strange new culture. It took some years for me to understand the need, in my paintings, to return to my roots. I found my influences then changing to Ancient Arts and those Arts made specifically for religious or magical purposes’ (Carmen Turyn, Artist’s website). Elaborating, she says that, ‘An important recent influence on my work has been that of San Rock Art. Working from reproductions of their paintings has demonstrated to me that the San understood form through movement. This results perhaps not only from their knowledge, as hunters, of animal movement, but also from their close association with Nature. Their images were made in trance-state, bringing them ever closer to a Supernatural element. This powerful community of daily life, religion, and art, connects with a fundamental thinking, one in which there are no opposites, only interdependence. San Art therefore […] speaks to me on a profound level. My work is impelled by movement. Movement = breath = life' (Carmen Turyn, Artist’s website). Following her time in Israel, Turyn has also been much influenced by Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah in her work (Jewish Chronicle, 4 November, 1994).
Italian-British artist and former Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, London (RCA), Peter de Francia, said of Turyn’s work: ‘As a creative artist, Carmen Turyn is difficult to classify and within the current cultural climate I would deem this an advantage. She has always produced paintings that appear at first sight to be expressionist in mood and in which colour is used emotively, playing an important role in her visual imagery. But the designation of her work as stemming from expressionism would be to use the term in a singularly restrictive way. For the basis of all she does consists of a process of self discovery and frequently of self analysis and a definition of this in itself is always hollow frontiered. But this relentless search for a synthesis between the world of appearances and an interior dialogue concerning such a world is central to her concerns. For this reason her work seldom appears introverted’ (Peter de Francia, Carmen Turyn website). Carmen Turyn lives and works in London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Carmen Turyn]
Publications related to [Carmen Turyn] in the Ben Uri Library