Naile Akıncı was born in Van in 1923. Following the War of Indepence, her father was appointed to İstanbul, where  she entered Nişantaşı Girls High School. After graduation she decided to enter the Academy of Fine Arts and graduated after  some  interruptions due to a disease in 1952. It was then that she started painting her series “Views of Eyüp and Haliç (Golden Horn)”, hundreds of variations, variations she still continues to paint. 
Levent Çalıkoğlu, in the book accompanying this retrospective exhibition remarks to this  subject.

“She transforms visible objects into components and orders that she has mentally designed so as to reflect everything - Eyüp or the Golden Horn and the dephts, gaps, prominences, and horizontals associated with them –that is in her mind. This is why Akıncı always shows us what she knows and sees, no matter what her specific point of departure may be. For this reason, all the formal elements acquire a representative character that broadens from the particular to general. This variation is the biggest reason why the similarity among these painting doesn’t turn into a schematization of form, into cliched composition, or into repetitive coloring.

In her more than fifty years as an artist, Naile Akıncı has always based her relationships with nature, the human body, and objects on her own likeness. The act of producing a painting that is sufficient unto itself and needs no outside help has always been the principal driving force impelling her works. The language she employs clearly demarcates causes and results, beginning and ends, and - most important of all -direction and course of a work’s development.

Honestly devoted to art, she has not the slightest hesitatiton to be herself in even the tiniest line that she lays down. In coming before viewers, she has never failed them in her sincerity. For this reason, in whatever she offers there is more than just color, line, and paint: there is also a piece of herself. “