Nur Koçak

Koçak attended TED Ankara College where she learned painting from Turgut Zaim.^[6] She continued her high school education in Washington DC, and was taught by the abstract-expressionist Leon Berkowitz.^[3] In 1960, she returned to Istanbul, where she studied under Adnan Çöker, Cemal Tollu and Neşet Günal in the Painting Department of the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. In 1970, she came first in the National Ministry of Education examinations and was sent to Paris on a scholarship to study painting at École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Jean Bertholle.^[7] In 1974 Koçak returned to Istanbul and began teaching at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts between 1975 and 1981.

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.^[5] She further developed her style in a following series, Pictures of Happiness, where she moved from painting and began to use recycled images into art pieces. She continued this theme in Family Album, a series that uses found images from her own past. Another change was "Vitrines," a series consisting of images of herself in the context of how women's bodies and images are displayed on commercial vitrines in 1980s Istanbul.^[7]