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, Önürmen has consistently taken humankind as his starting point; he portrays characters straight out of real life. The artist is motivated by social and personal experiences and strives to address these stories before they are forgotten or lost.

Önürmen resorts to cultural memory as well as his own personal memories when producing his drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures. Utilizing an archive of images collected from newspapers and magazines, he offers new perspectives on the problematics he started exploring in the 1990s, which range from contemporary urban culture to lifestyle, identity, and the body, and fall into broad categories such as power, capital, and consumer culture. Bringing to light the impact of mass media on the human psyche, the artist centers identities who are not satisfied with their existence, depicting them with their attitudes, clothing, or accessories. Sometimes he hints at the original backdrops of his portraits; at other times, these are absent, and he brings the figure directly in front of the viewer, as if leaving them to confront each other. Önürmen portrays his figures as if extracted momentarily from daily life—an idiosyncratic approach to contextualization.

Önürmen often makes use of a visual archive of newspaper clippings that he has built over the years, which he views as a reflection of daily life. Treating police interventions in protests, marches, street demonstrations, and similar events, “Police Baton” is rife with the heat and tension of such a moment. Collage additions highlight the personal features in the clothes, adding an element of sincerity to the depiction. There is a palpable contrast between them and the police intervention.