Nur Koçak


Nur Koçak is a contemporary feminist Turkish artist who was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1941. She is a pioneering representative of hyperrealism in Turkey since the 1970s. 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 went to a high school at TED Ankara College where she initially obtained her interest in learning how to paint. 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 was taught by Adnan Çöker, Cemal Tollu and Neşet Günal at the Painting Department of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. In 1970, she won the exam of the National Ministry of Education and was sent to Paris with a scholarship to master painting at École des Beaux-Arts where she studied in the studio of Jean Bertholle.

Works

While in Paris, she was influenced by the legacy of the Situationists and their critique of consumerism. Looking into 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 titled, Fetishist Objects/Woman as an Object. In this series she portrayed women as the objects the same way they use the objects from the advertisements. She further developed her unique style in her following series, Pictures of Happiness, where she moved from painting and used recycled images to form art. She continued this theme in Family Album, another series that employs found images, this time from her past. Another progression was “Vitrines”, a series consisting of images of herself in context of how women's bodies and images are displayed on commercial vitrines in 1980s Istanbul.
Koçak employs a style that directly confronts the issues of consumerism and women while excluding women from most of her art: it is the objects of female ornamentation that are the focus of her work, while the female body is depicted only in a fragmented way. This is a commentary on how women are driven by the advertisements they see in society and are constricted by this limitation. Koçak's criticism of consumerist culture and its representations of female body has contributed to the feminist movement in Turkey.

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 Made in Turkey: Artists' Positions 1978-2008 exhibition at Ernst Barlach Museum in Wedel and Drostei Museum in Pinneberg, Germany.
Koçak's work was included in the 2012 exhibition Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey and the 2013 collection exhibition Past and Future at the İstanbul Modern.