The Manifest Painting

Irem Kucukay was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1983. She studied Hospitality Management, and worked for different hotels in Istanbul, New York and London meanwhile continuing to persue her passion of painting for all these years. Living in different countries and synthesizing herself with different cultures for so many years, helped to develop her own creativity. She now lives in Istanbul and keeps on expressing her own melancholic world through colors. Color itself has always fascinated her and has formed the basis of all her work, starting with impressionism. She is interested in creating an imaginary space that feels familiar but is more ambiguous, chaotic and abstracted. In her painting world, she likes to see indecisive plains dancing with the shapes to intersect, overlap, pile-up and ultimately create a sense of visual distance and depth that we can identify in the most complex way. Her process involves a back and forth play between spontaneous mark-making and a careful deliberation. `I make paintings because the act of manipulating colors on a canvas is an intriguing process for me and I like to see how the whole work perfectly matches my thoughts about existing in a different dimension` she says.