Turgo was born in Haiti schooling at the Lycée Toussaint Louverture. His artistic education was informal, and began with a childhood love for drawing. He was a self-taught painter in his teens and later expanded his techniques as a commercial artist for several years. Known primarily for his paintings, both oil and acrylic, he has acquired additional skills as a sculptor, using objects such as aluminum, wood, scrap metals and natural fibers, to further exploring and explaining his vision.
The vivid and visually powerful abstract paintings of Turgo Bastien glow with an inner spiritual luminosity, depicting the artist’s fascination with his searching and revealing the light within the ultimate darkness and the truth and nobility that is present in even the humblest of subjects. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries world-wide, and published in several books such as The Bahamas Journal, the Miami Herald, and the Haitian Art in the Diaspora. Denver Post, 303 Magazine, Here There and Beyond.
Such exposure has drawn critical acclaim internationally for their imagery, a formal vocabulary he has developed that combines totemic Afro-Caribbean symbols with a striking modern sensibility that uses the rhythms and colors of his native Haiti to express a truly poetic cosmological reality. Turgo combines, personalizes, and refines theses juxtapositions with a deft sophistication that shows mastery of his medium and his striking contemporary iconography.
For the past 20 years, Turgo has maintained homes and actively works in studios in Jacmel, Haiti, Nassau Bahamas, and West Palm Beach Florida, while producing a significant body of work that is a testimony to the importance of his work, its expressiveness, sophistication, and a firm grounding in the international art dialogue.
Turgo is the founder and active supporter of the Art Creation Foundation, an art school for children located in Jacmel Haiti…
