Bahar Artan Oskay was born in Istanbul in 1984. She completed her undergraduate education at Yeditepe University Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Plastic Arts in 2006 and received her master’s degree in the same department in 2011. After completing the Proficiency in Art program of the Department of Art and Design at Yıldız Technical University in 2017, Bahar started working as vice chairman of the Department of Plastic Arts at Yeditepe University Faculty of Fine Arts.
In her early periods, Bahar interpreted the works of the great masters of modern art while studying popular culture. While interpreting and appropriating the works of these artists in a wide range from Mondrian to Matisse, from Picasso to Gauguin, she made popular art an agenda item with an original point of view. In his later years, she produced a series of works on the problematic of how popular images create awareness in contemporary life and how they transform into artworks in one-to-one interaction.

Influenced by Picasso’s words “Every creative movement starts with a destruction before”, Bahar entered into a new phase where she started the process of interpreting her own art by cutting, destroying and re-composing her old paintings under the influence of the inevitable artistic change with a method that she could not predict. This change in her paintings is based on the “uncontrolled” combination of “controlled” creation.

According to Bahar destruction is necessary to create, the process of destruction is chronic as well as painful. But if there is a point you aim to reach, destruction is also a stepping-stone. Oskay reached abstract art from figurative abstraction after the randomly close frames she created in this destruction process. Abstract became a part of abstraction in Okay’s paintings.

Bahar’s latest aluminum (multi-layered) works are derived from a sense of destruction, purity, and absence. She points out to create large gaps in her paintings and the shadows filtering between these gaps are the shadows of the absence. According to the artist, non-existence refers to the existing. The created spaces allow thinking and interpreting, let the viewer to complete the space as perceived.