Born in 1922 in Tunis to a family of Turkish origin, Hedi Turki completed his schooling at Lycée Carnot in 1940 and couldn’t pursue his studies after the death of his father. As the eldest child, he had to support the whole family and went on collecting odd jobs being tailor or laborer in the oil mill. After the second world war, he joined the School of Tunis and learned the basics of pictorial art before he traveled in 1951 to Paris for two months to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Between 1956 and 1957, he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, benefiting from a scholarship and trained under the supervision of the Italian painter Amerigo Bartoli. Lastly, he enrolled at Columbia University in 1959 for three months discovering the artworks of the post-war abstract movements. From 1965 to 1985, he taught art at the École des Beaux-Arts de Tunis and was one of the founding members of the Ecole de Tunis. In his early works, Hedi Turki showed a taste and technique for naturalistic representations, but his experience in the United-States marked a shift in his oeuvre.
Turki’s work has been regularly exhibited in Tunisia, France, England and across Europe.
He effectively moved towards painting more abstract with a work on color field and lines which look like grids.
Turki was instrumental in the founding of the Ecole de Tunis (School of Tunis) as well as in the establishment of both the National Union of plastic and graphic arts of Tunisia and the General Union of Arab Plastic Artists. His work has evolved over time, a nationalist vocation at first, usually figurative like most members of the School of Tunis. Turki then became strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism following his trip to the United States, where he was mainly inspired by two renowned American painters: Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Mark Rothko (1913-1970). Since his first visit to the USA, he has been reacting in response to the pictorial academic style and folklore representations of the Ecole de Tunis, thus introducing abstract painting in Tunisia. Turki's abstract style is marked by a deep sense of Tunisia and a somewhat religious aspect, which distinguishes it from other artists of his time. Hedi Turki passed away in 2019 in Sidi Bou Saïd.