İlhan Koman’s 98th Birthday

Google Dooles 17.06.2019 00:08  Date: June 17, 2019 “Can science and art meet in one place?” asked Turkish artist İlhan Koman, born in Edirne on this day in 1921. “I'm trying to realize this meeting in sculpture… I'm trying to create new forms.” Today’s Doodle celebrates the multidisciplinary sculptor whose wide-ranging interests and endless experimentation with various media and techniques, as well as mathematical concepts, led some to call him the “Leonardo Da Vinci of Turkey.” As a child, Koman enjoyed playing with bolts and screws, and spent hours at a local blacksmith’s shop, watching the craftsman work with metal. When visiting relatives in the seaside city of Istanbul, he made models of ferry boats in the harbor and planned to become a shipbuilder before deciding to go to art school. Upon graduating from Istanbul’s Art Academy, he moved to Paris, where he studied during the 1940s, opened a workshop, exhibited his own abstract sculpture, and spent hours in the Louvre admiring the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art and the work of modern masters such as Rodin, Brancusi, and Giacometti. While representing Turkey in the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, he met the architect Ralph Erskine, who invited him to work in Sweden. It was there that Koman would also teach at Stockholm’s Konstfack School of Applied Art. In the 1960s, he bought a two-masted wooden sailboat called the Hulda, which he adapted into a studio and living space. During his time in Sweden, Koman began what he called his ‘Iron Age,’ exploring the malleability of metal. He created many public works, the best known of which is the monumental sculpture Akdeniz in Istanbul. The 4.5 ton figure of a woman with outstretched arms was fashioned from 112 strips of metal. Doğum günün kutlu olsun, İlhan! Location: Tags: , , ,