Ali Demirci

“I paint my works in a grotesque style, blending human and animal figures.”

Ali Demirci was born in Istanbul in 1990 and works in Istanbul. He graduated from the Painting Teaching programme at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University in 2018 and in 2020 began a master's degree in painting at the same university; his thesis topic is new figurative tendencies and grotesque expression in modern Turkish painting. In his paintings human and animal images intertwine: power, belief systems, moral norms and social decay are reinterpreted in a visual language drawn from Mikhail Bakhtin's ideas of carnival and the grotesque. Since 2015 he has taken part in group exhibitions in Çanakkale, Eskişehir, Istanbul and Barcelona, and in 2022 his work was included in the Nuri İyem Painting Award Exhibition.