Ivan Petkov with the pseudonym Turkata was born on December 1, 1945 in Sofia. A civil engineer by profession, he devotes his life to fine art. He began painting in the 1960s, captivated by the dramatic and grotesque visions of the world in the works of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, as well as the canvases of Paul Delvaux and Salvador Dali. He found himself in surrealism and worked in its field until the end of his life in 2012. Because of his creative convictions, he remained a solitary figure in the time of dogmatic socialist aesthetics.In the 1970s, he was already an accomplished artist with mature works in which, in addition to his non-canonical aesthetic biases, his political convictions, contrastingly contradicting the official regime, were evident. This combination makes his life as an artist difficult. In 1981, he opened an exhibition at the House of Cinema, which was closed on the second day by the State Security authorities. In the 1990s, he moved to the Rhodope village of Ribnovo, where he created in peace and with scale. In 1997, he held a large solo exhibition at SGHH, and later exhibited in the galleries "GalEros", "Paris", "Irida", "Questions". In the conditions of free aesthetic expression, his paintings were appreciated and some of them became the property of private collections. He also works and experiments in the field of sculpture and decorative art.

"I try to depict in a poetic way the existential drama of man in his quest for wealth and immortality, the struggle between good and evil, between the divine and the diabolical principle."