Taner Ceylan is a prominent Turkish painter born in 1967 in Selb, Germany. In 1991, he graduated from Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul and has since held solo exhibitions both in Turkey and Germany. Despite the controversy surrounding his works, Ceylan has been widely recognized as the best contemporary hyperrealist painter of his time.

His technical precision and love for detail animate both objects and bodies in a way that few artists are able to achieve. The homoerotic nature of Ceylan’s works has been widely criticized in the Turkish press and has won him the reputation as someone obsessed with the explicitly sexual. Such speculations have seemingly not affected Ceylan’s career, as his paintings are often aligned with the eroticism of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Ceylan currently resides in Istanbul where he frequently exhibits. He briefly lectured at Yeditepe University in Istanbul and, between 2001 and 2006, Ceylan was the art section editor of Time Out Istanbul. His paintings can be found in public institutions, such as the Dr. Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı Foundation in Istanbul and the Scheringa Museum of Realist Art in Holland.