Sotheby’s senior vice president Ali Can Ertug, a specialist in contemporary Turkish art, has died after falling from his eighth-floor Manhattan apartment in the early hours of May 4. He was 36.

Ertug, the nephew of the photographer Ahmet Ertug, was born to an artistic family in Istanbul in 1973 and was raised in that city. He attended Istanbul’s Alman Lisesi, moved to the United States in 1992, and went to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he studied art history, writing his thesis on the artist Bruce Nauman.

Ertug began his auction house career at Sotheby’s, where he worked from 1996 to 1999 as a specialist in the 19th-century paintings department, specializing in the auction house's Turkish sales. Moving to Christie’s in 1999, he worked for seven years as vice president of the 19th-century European paintings department, coordinating with teams of specialists in London and New York to organize sales of Orientalist paintings. He was also instrumental in the opening of Christie’s office in Istanbul, in 2005.

Ertug returned to Sotheby’s in January 2008, where he helped launch that auction house's Istanbul office as well. During his tenure, Sotheby’s has seen rapid growth in business with Turkish clients, both at auction and in private sales.

Click here to read an interview with Ertug, conducted last month and scheduled to appear in the June 2010 issue of Art + Auction magazine, in which the specialist discusses his work building a market for Turkish contemporary art.