Ercüment Tarhan was born as the second child of a farmer family with seven children in the village of Bayraktutan in Iğdır, Turkey (1956).
He completed his primary, secondary and high school education in Iğdır (1974).
His love for art started in primary school and his acquaintance with poetry was in secondary school. He was given various awards in a number of poetry competitions. In the years of high school, he had his sketchbook in one pocket and his diary of poems in the other. He was honoured as one of the “Young Poets” in the year of 1971 with his poem “Feet”.
His poems were often published in the local newspapers in Iğdır. He could meet with a genuine art teacher only in the high school and only for one term. The idea of going to the Academy of Fine Arts took shape during that time. Only after two years that he graduated from the high school, he had the chance to go to the Academy (1977).
During these two years, he worked in the village primary schools as a substitute teacher. In the coming years he got an award in the “National Young Poets Competition” organized by the Academy (1980).

“I appreciate my father” he said to an old friend of his, who had at times also modeled for him. Years later she would write about his life, passion and the spesific manner of being an artist:
“His father had never questioned his interest in reading or his decision to study painting. He was the only reader of The Milliyet Journal of Art. Iğdır’s only bookshop received only four copies of it and sent back the remaining three every month. As soon as he had finished high school he came to Istanbul and spent several years (1977 – 1983) in The Academy, from which he graduated with the highest grades. He always knew and accepted, from the very beginning, the enormous price he was going to pay for choosing to exist as a painter in Turkey. An existence that is centred in nothing else, strives to be nothing less than a painter, an acceptance of this as if, in some ways one does not really exist in this world.
A life of passion beyond passion, lived as a response to the appeal of the invisible in the visible, as a responsibility felt in touching the flesh of the world, as a spiritual experience that could release his soul from all the burdens of daily existence if the painting goes well and frustrate him deeply when it does not. The spirit that incarnates in his painting promises only finitude to the gaze that touches it. Perhaps there is also the call to leave the present state of affairs in order to go for a journey, in the fascination of a face, meeting the future in its lines, uncovering a forgotten world…

“I was a figure in the painting he made for graduation, as he was finishing his studies in The Academy of Fine Arts in 1983. My experience as a model, which is limited to Ercüment Tarhan’s painting, had thus started with this, his final work for school. This experience of being the object of the artist’s gaze has repeated itself through time and provided me, in turn, with several occasions to watch him paint. As the object of the gaze I was also always more than mere object, for he always included me in the process of creation, eliciting from me, the movement, the pose, always engaging in dialogue about the creative event bursting forth on the canvas. Meanwhile, I witnessed him paint a painting of self-erasure –a certain retreat of the ego through the brush and the colour, giving rise to the appearance of a vision in every point of the canvas. He kept working, carrying an endless debate with his own silence and he always met with what he had been looking for those days and nights, as if it had been brought into being by a miracle.
I used to live in my own world in the midst of friends from the Acamedy who were a few years older than me. Ercüment Tarhan was certainly the most special friend I had at that time. Inquiring into the reasons that made his presence so special for me, as much as for other people, I see that they lay in his being free of prejudices of any sort. He refused to categorize people according to age, sex, social status, class etc. He was open, in both his person and in his art to welcome the alterity of the other without reducing or distorting it. In short, he was able to let the other… be. His freeing open proximity gave me the space to enter into the world of painting, by enabling me to relate differently to my own deep anxieties.
Thinking retrospectively, I believe that hospitality was the trait that unified his character.”(Zeynep Direk, Gösteri 2000).

In 1990 he moved his studio to Ankara and went to England for the sake of a relationship. He continued his art work in England for two years. He got married in the same year (with Ayşe Durakbaşa, sociologist) his son, Nisan was born there as well.
He had two exhibitions, the first in Colchester (May 1991) and the other in London (June, 1991) with the paintings that he made in England.

Black Notebooks also started at that time (1991).

He had the chance to see the works of the masters in the history of art and various exhibitions which displayed marked collections. He often visited the museums . After his visits to Amsterdam and Scotland and having had close ties with the Northern art with its cold but bright characteristics, he returned to Turkey with his family (1992).

Art has been his total life-engagement. Therefore, his position as an art teacher in schools at primary education level lasted only two years (1994-1996), as his health also weakened day by day.
He designed and organized the exhibition called “Geography without Identity and Lost Roots” together with the sociologist Ayşe Durakbaşa (1999).
He organized the exhibition called “Republic ‘ 99” (1999).
His son, Ali Cemre was born in 2000.

He moved to Muğla because of family problems. He continued his works as an artist partly in Muğla and partly in his studio in İstanbul for two years (2002-2003) and returned back to İstanbul in 2004.

Ercüment Tarhan, has created the poetic language of silence in the special themes of his own by marking the importance of composition, frame and light in his paintings; also by his extraordinary use of color and sometimes by forcing the limitations of black and white in his works.
“Belonging to Night”, “Woman and Apple”, “Within the Garden” (England), “In the Garden”, “Regarding Woman, “Garden and Water”(England), “Journeys, Objects and Faces” relate the titles of a number of exhibitions that he has actualized.

His Works: They are part of museums or other collections in Germany, U.S.A, Austria, Brazil, Holland, Switzerland, Canada.
The artist is now based in his studio, in Beyoglu, Istanbul.