Born in Ankara, Turkey in 1971, Irmak Canevi lives and works in Istanbul. After schooling in Turkey and the US, Irmak left his legal career at an international law firm in Istanbul and followed his muse to London, taking a BA in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Art in 2008, where he studied painting. In 2015 he received his MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design.
Irmak's process has its origin in an ongoing activity: the rigorous redecoration of his studio. Organization and placement of its content—a world of materials that are found, bought, gifted, or made, the furniture, the books, the clippings, even the sardines and the spices—inform a variegated body of work that is reflective of the goings-on in the workplace. Stuff he accumulates daily gets grouped, regrouped, categorized, and stored. In constant flux and full of potential, his studio is literally the mother of all works. Objects produced in this informally curated environment become offsprings of its aesthetics. Content in passage is suspended and entrapped to make still-lives, which then become souvenirs from a remarkable time and place.