Umit Turgay Durgun is a sculptor and a graffiti artist from Istanbul Turkey, living and working in Carrara, Italy.
For high school, he went to Macka Akif Tuncel Anatolian plastic arts school, and for university, he went to the Marmara University, faculty of fine arts, sculpture department in Istanbul, Turkey. Soon after he went to Carrara Italy for a master's degree, and he continues living and producing his art there.
Durgun started his art journey early while growing up making Graffiti in the streets of Istanbul. By that time, he realized that he wants to continue doing art in public spaces.                                                      
Moreover, as a young boy, he was greatly inspired by ancient civilizations, from their architecture, enormous buildings, and temples to their art and mythology, he was fascinated with their choice of creatures that represented their gods to help them cope with their mysterious world and explain behavior and personal characteristics like good and evil, etc. he learned that Myth was the truth not from outside but from inside, putting each human characteristic in a figure that they made sacred and worshipped, then they built temples to honor these invented gods.                       

From all aspects, Durgun got influenced big time, and that is seen in his artwork, in his architectural language and the elements he uses, on his mythological designs. Even in solving solutions while working he always consider the primitive techniques that they were using.                                                                      

All this kept building up inside him and made his decision clear for wanting to recreate the same experience, to dream and think big and realize monumental artworks that the public can get close to and interact with.

 

Later on, as a teenager, he got so into the big bang, creation, and the appearance of the first human that science discovered. From that period onwards he started connecting the dots and putting the puzzle together. he started searching for the development of these primitive people and how they kept evolving for millions and thousands of years, from hunters and gatherers to great builders. It is not just how they evolved physically, but how their thinking evolved and led them to who we became today and how their evolution led to creating civilizations. he learned that civilization is more than energy and creative power, it's years, and years of continuous evolution and natural selection. He realized that there were builders and creators with a purpose through all ages no matter how it all started. Using the simplest brains to create the simplest tools for surviving, started with the resilience to live, survive, reproduce, and dominate. From making the simplest sharp knife from pebbles for hunting to gradually through years building empires and leaving The Greatest trace on planet earth.

Durgun never focuses on one material, He exuberantly explores the path of any material that falls right into his hands. he works with all kinds of materials and he believes that each one serves a concept and a context. This leads him to choose the appropriate one for each new project depending on the design and its idea.
He uses wood, steel, aluminum, marble, hard stones (Granite, quartzite, basalt, etc), metal sheets, bronze, and ceramic. He even does kinetic/mechanical sculptures and does all the computer programming on his own. He builds up all his sculptures on his own from construction to final finishing in his studio in Carrara.