Hello! I am Onur Erler.
An award-winning visual artist, creative director, graphic designer and illustrator with a strong background in fine arts and visual communication. Founder of Babka Creative Workshop & Babka Art, and a lecturer at Istanbul Kent University. Passionate about combining art, design and education to inspire and innovate in the creative industry.
I was born in Istanbul in 1982 and graduated from Marmara University, Atatürk Faculty of Education, Department of Fine Arts. I’m currently pursuing my Master’s degree in Communication and Design at Beykent University.
My professional journey began in 2004 in the advertising industry, where I worked as a senior art director at agencies like TBWA / Cortex, Öykü Dialogue International, and Rekta Ketchum — later becoming the creative director at Bed&Breakfast. Over the years, I’ve led award-winning design teams and collaborated with numerous international and national brands including Sony, La Vache Qui Rit, Haribo, Halkbank, Red Bull, Shell, Lotto, Danone - Nutirica, Pfizer, Novartis, KFC Turkey. My work has been recognized by multiple prestigious organizations such as Google, Felis Awards, and GMK Design Awards.
In 2017, I co-founded Babka Creative Workshop, a boutique advertising agency where I continue to develop visual campaigns that blend strategy, storytelling, and design thinking.
In addition to my work in advertising, I’m the founder of Babka Art, a creative education platform where I offer digital illustration workshops, mentorship programs, and design-focused training sessions. These initiatives aim to guide emerging artists and designers in developing both their technical skills and visual thinking capacities.
As a visual artist, I produce surrealistic digital art pieces, and my work has been exhibited in multiple shows over the years.
I currently work as a lecturer in the English Visual Communication Design Department at Istanbul Kent University, while continuing to produce work across the fields of art, design, and creative education.
Artist Statement
Creating my own plane of meaning thanks to the freedom provided by surrealism, the quest to tell my stories which are mostly set in a matriarchal world and actually be able to converge on a "feeling" that touches the heart of the beholder constitutes the essence of my work.
In a way, the timelessness and coexistence of sadness, rebellion, hope, all human emotions are told in these stories with familiar images of humanity that do not belong to any particular culture but speak to every soul, riddled with elaborate metaphors that play with the perception of time and space.
My artistic adventure is summed up in my effort to reflect my curiosity towards human behaviour in my works, by giving great importance to the color, form, line interactions, composition, that is, the plastic elements of the work on the one hand, and pushing my own intuitive limits on the other.