Guide
The Selçuk Yaşar Painting Museum is an old İzmir house that was restored and then given work to do. It opened to visitors in 1985 under the Yaşar Education and Culture Foundation, which describes it as the first private painting museum in Türkiye.
Its collection has an unusual origin: it is built from the works that won prizes in the DYO painting competitions, and the foundation holds that this has brought it to the point of offering a panorama of half a century of Turkish painting. In 1990 a second institution was added on the floor below, the Selçuk Yaşar Art Gallery, which puts on painting exhibitions through the year.
That programme is the reason to check what is on before going: the exhibition list the foundation publishes runs from 1990 to the end of 2019 and reaches 286 shows, a mixture of solo exhibitions by individual painters, group shows, and occasional displays of other material such as kilims and photographs.
