Biography
İrem Sakaoğlu is a Turkish visual artist and designer whose practice spans digital art, painting, mixed media, and object-based work.
Drawing has been part of her life since early childhood; works she created at the age of two and a half remain in her personal archive today. She was admitted to Uludağ University’s Fine Arts Education programme as the top-ranked entrant and graduated in 2002.
After graduation, Sakaoğlu worked as a textile pattern designer before establishing her own art studio, where she taught painting to children and organised exhibitions with her students. Since 2009, she has also worked in architectural design, developing residential projects as well as interior and furniture designs, and overseeing their realisation.
For Sakaoğlu, these disciplines do not represent separate creative identities. Painting, digital image-making, architecture, furniture design, and working with physical materials emerge from the same impulse: to conceive something that does not yet exist and give it form.
Today, she brings her independent artistic practice to the foreground, working across physical and digital media without placing one above the other.
Artist Statement
My work does not begin with a predetermined theme or with the intention of creating a series. An image may originate in something I have read, seen, or experienced, or simply in a thought that unexpectedly takes shape in my mind.
When an idea arrives, I often see much of the image as a whole before I begin. Yet I do not treat that first vision as an instruction. As the work develops, I allow it to change, move away from the original idea, and find its own direction.
Fantasy literature, mysticism, the supernatural, science and technology, nature, and animals all inhabit my visual world. I have always been drawn to what remains unexplained or exists just beyond the familiar. Dragons, rabbits, and wolves recur throughout my work, alongside anonymous human figures and imagined beings. These elements carry personal associations, but I have no interest in fixing their meaning for the viewer.
Nothing I place within an image is entirely arbitrary. Yet once the work is seen, its meaning no longer belongs exclusively to me. Every viewer arrives with a different memory, history, and inner world. I do not want to determine what someone should feel in front of my work.
Colour operates in much the same way. I am drawn to vivid colour even when the subject is mysterious, unfamiliar, or supernatural. I do not believe mystery must exist in darkness. The relationship between these subjects and colour is instinctive rather than constructed.
I make no distinction in artistic value between a painting created with a physical brush and an image drawn with a digital pen. Oil paint, digital tools, wood, and other materials are different means through which an idea can take form. The medium changes; the act of creation does not.
I rarely consider a work completely finished. At some point, however, its moment of making comes to an end. Once that happens, I do not return months later to correct it. If I discover something I would now approach differently, that knowledge belongs to the next work. The previous one remains a record of who I was when I made it.
For me, making is not separate from living. Even when I am physically still, my mind is usually constructing something — an image, an object, a space, a possibility. Creating is not simply something I do; it is the way I understand and move through the world.
