Ali Mirmak is a UK-based artist whose practice moves between painting, décollage, and mixed media, exploring the themes of memory, surface, and intuitive process. His work is grounded in a physical engagement with materials, a sensitivity to texture, and a deep interest in how time and experience leave their traces.

In his painting practice, Mirmak uses oil paint in a slow, accumulative way — layering, scraping, and editing the surface over time. Often working with a restrained colour palette and using a squeegee to apply and remove paint, he creates gestural compositions where each mark is both a response to the previous layer and a preparation for the next. His paintings are quiet, contemplative spaces that invite emotional and sensory interpretation, rather than narrative reading.

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In recent years, Mirmak has expanded his practice into décollage, working with photographs he takes during regular walks through places that have shaped him — familiar landscapes and urban textures he has known for most of his life. These photographs function as a starting point: using a scalpel, he tears, cuts, and peels back layers of the image, responding instinctively to shapes, textures, and imperfections within the printed surface. This physical, improvisational process — likened to doodling — becomes a kind of dialogue between artist and environment, an intimate reworking of personal geography that speaks to erosion, transformation, and memory.

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Sketchbooks are an essential part of Mirmak’s process. They are spaces of exploration and immediacy, where ideas for paintings and décollage works are tested, collaged, drawn over, and reimagined without the pressure of resolution. These working books reveal the connective tissue of his practice: the daily act of noticing, experimenting, and allowing ideas to emerge organically over time.

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Across all mediums, Ali Mirmak’s work shares a concern with balance — between order and chaos, making and unmaking, presence, and disappearance — and an ongoing search for meaning through material, intuition, and place.

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Artist Statement

"My practice is rooted in process, surface, and intuition. I rarely begin a piece with a fixed outcome in mind; instead, I work responsively with the materials, allowing the process to guide the direction of the work.

In painting, I build and remove layers over time, letting gestures, textures, and the weight of paint shape the composition. In my décollage pieces, I begin with photographs of familiar places — the overlooked textures of walls, posters, and urban surfaces — and work into them with a scalpel, tearing and peeling layers as a way of drawing. These interventions are instinctive, like a conversation with the forms and rhythms of my environment.

The act of cutting, peeling, layering, or scraping is a way of thinking through material — revealing the hidden, celebrating the accidental, and recording the passage of time. My sketchbooks are an extension of this process: spaces of freedom where ideas are tested, discarded, or developed without judgment.

Whether through paint, paper, or collage, my work reflects a quiet negotiation between presence and loss, construction and decay — a physical and emotional mapping of the world around me."