Born in Istanbul in 1997, Tunahan graduated from Yeditepe University, Department of Plastic Arts and Painting. Embracing an interdisciplinary approach, he works across iron, ceramics, canvas, and walls (unbound by surface, technique, or formal limitation) and produces with an intuitive, inward orientation.

Duman’s practice often unfolds in a permeable space between abstraction and the unconscious. At times suggesting figurative facial features, at times moving through entirely intuitive forms, his visual language aims not to impose meaning but to cultivate an emotional and experiential contact with the viewer.

Two major motorcycle journeys in 2018 and 2019, five months and over 35,000 km across Central Asia along the Silk Road, and an 18,000 km route to Nepal along the Spice Road, marked turning points in his work. The sketches and affective impressions gathered across these geographies were later transformed in Istanbul into an abstract mode of expression.

A subsequent seven-month, 30,000 km journey through South America in 2022–2023 further redirected his practice. Traveling by car, he observed different countries, their endemic people, faces, and emotional diversity. In this period, rather than seeking deliberate transmission, Duman allowed the subconscious to leave its own traces on the surface. Faces in his drawings often merge; forms oscillate between the abstract and the figurative. This ambiguity invites viewers to project their own subconscious images, much like the inkblot tests used by psychologists. For Duman, art does not dictate meaning; it facilitates the viewer’s act of drawing meaning from within.

Over time, his investigations on canvas have evolved into large-scale murals and public-surface works. Moving among the resistances of different materials and the associations of diverse surfaces, he treats “the road” not merely as a physical line but as a field of inner accumulation and transformation. Travel is a point of departure; yet what grounds his production are the traces left by that experience, the sense of ephemerality in tension with permanence, the stillness of the pandemic, and the shifting emotions that accrue in the artist’s own unconscious. Thus, his work becomes a search for balance where motion and stillness, outer and inner worlds, intermix.

For more than seven years, Duman has also worked professionally in marketing within the motorcycle industry. In his practice, he organically unites these two realms, movement, travel, experience, and the impulse to leave a trace. For him, art is less about arriving at a destination than about remaining on the road and continually transforming.