Nur Koçak is a contemporary

feminist Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...

Turkish artist who was born in

Istanbul Istanbul is the List of largest cities and towns in Turkey, largest city in Turkey, constituting the country's economic, cultural, and historical heart. With Demographics of Istanbul, a population over , it is home to 18% of the Demographics ...

, Turkey in 1941. She is most well known for her works that comment on women's objectification in consumerist societies. She lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey.

Education

Koçak attended

TED Ankara College TED Ankara College Foundation Schools is a group of private schools in Turkey. It consists of kindergarten, elementary, middle and high schools. Its İncek Campus, considered sizeable with 141,000 square meters of enclosed and over 309,000 square ...

where she learned painting from Turgut Zaim. She continued her high school education in Washington DC, and was taught by the abstract-expressionist Leon Berkowitz. In 1960, she returned to Istanbul, where she studied under Adnan Çöker, Cemal Tollu and Neşet Günal in the Painting Department of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. In 1970, she came first in the National Ministry of Education examinations and was sent to Paris on a scholarship to study painting at

École des Beaux-Arts ; ) refers to a number of influential art schools in France. The term is associated with the Beaux-Arts architecture, Beaux-Arts style in architecture and city planning that thrived in France and other countries during the late nineteenth centu ...

in the studio of

Jean Bertholle Jean Bertholle (26 June 1909, Dijon – 6 December 1996, Paris) was a French painter of the new Paris School. References

1909 births 1996 deaths 20th-century French painters 20th-century French male artists French male painters Artis ...

. In 1974 Koçak returned to Istanbul and began teaching at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts between 1975 and 1981.

Works

While in Paris, she was influenced by the

Situationists The Situationist International (SI) was an Proletarian internationalism, international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and Political philosophy, political theorists. It was prominent in Eu ...

and their critique of consumerism. After studying French advertisements and their representation of the female body, she became particularly interested in the photo-realism movement and created her first series of paintings entitled ''Fetishist Objects/Woman as an Object'' to explore how mass media uses fetish objects and objectifies female images. She further developed her style in a following series, ''Pictures of Happiness'', where she moved from painting and began to use recycled images into art pieces. She continued this theme in ''Family Album'', a series that uses found images from her own past. Another change was "Vitrines," a series consisting of images of herself in the context of how women's bodies and images are displayed on commercial vitrines in 1980s Istanbul.

Exhibitions

Nur Koçak participated at the International Triennial of Plastic Arts Belgrade in 1979 and the International Drawing Biennial Lisbon in 1979 and 1981. Her work was included in the ''Made in Turkey: Artists' Positions 1978-2008'' Exhibition at the Ernst Barlach Museum in Wedel and the Drostei Museum in Pinneberg, Germany. Koçak has had 13 solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions in Turkey and abroad. Koçak's work was included in the 2012 exhibition ''Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey'' and the 2013 group exhibition ''Past and Future'' at the

İstanbul Modern Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, colloquially referred to as Istanbul Modern (), is a contemporary art gallery located inside the Galataport complex in the Beyoğlu district of Istanbul, Turkey. Inaugurated on December 11, 2004, Istanbul Modern was ...

. In 2019,

SALT In common usage, salt is a mineral composed primarily of sodium chloride (NaCl). When used in food, especially in granulated form, it is more formally called table salt. In the form of a natural crystalline mineral, salt is also known as r ...

presented, ''Our Blissful Souvenirs'', a comprehensive exhibit of Nur Koçak's work at SALT Beyoğlu and SALT Galata. The exhibit covered Koçak's work from the 1960s and 2010s including selections of early drawings and photographs, and explored representations of women in popular culture and the impact on Turkey.

Education

Works

Exhibitions

References

Further reading