Nur Koçak

Nur Koçak is a contemporary feminist Turkish artist who was born in Istanbul, 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 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 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 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. 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.

In 2019, SALT 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,