İrfan Önürmen, 1958

İrfan Önürmen graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Mimar Sinan University in 1987 after having worked at the studios of Neş’e Erdok and Neşet Günal. Although the materials the artist uses have varied over the years, he has consistently taken humankind as his starting point. Portraying characters straight out of real life, he depicts them in new contexts. He addresses social and personal experiences before they are forgotten or lost. Utilizing his archive of images collected from newspapers and magazines, he offers new perspectives on power, capital, and consumer culture as they relate to contemporary urban culture and lifestyle, identity, and the body.

In his “Figure Series,” Önürmen paints portraits of ordinary people. Some are familiar faces, some are characters that the artist wants to draw attention to, and some are people the viewer can directly relate to. “Figure No: 5” takes people of the city as their subject matter and can be thought of as cross sections of everyday life. The depiction is enriched with collage materials such as fabric, pen clips and paper.