Yalcin Cihangir was born 1968, Büyükcamili, Turkey. After having been employed as a blacksmith he became an international truck driver and decided to settle down in Amsterdam in the mid nineties and found work as a dish washer. In love with the national bicycle culture he felt inspired to design a family transport bike that became a great success. But the thriving business eventually went bankrupt and he was forced to return to dish washing, still practically illiterate in the Dutch language. In 2018 he started drawing out of “boredom and anger” expressing his beliefs in spirits and an animated world. This explains the visionary character of much of his work.
Davood Koochaki was born in 1939 in Jomebaza, northern Iran. At age thirteen, virtually illiterate, he decided to leave his family for Tehran in search of a better life. He was hired to help in a car repair workshop but ten years later he opened his own repair business. At age 40 he began to draw a little as a hobby, but it was only after he retired at age 60 that he pursued drawing more seriously. Encouraged by his son-in-law, a professional artist, he produced larger drawings with better materials, creating bolder figures and more striking forms in a hatching technique. His main subjects are birds and dark massive figures as mysterious humanoid monsters that may reflect his dark and difficult past as he once suggested. With his first exhibition outside Iran (2012, Galerie Hamer) he was on the path to world fame. He died in 2021.
