İlhan Koman

İlhan Koman (June 17, 1921 – December 30, 1986) was a Turkish sculptor. for which he was referred to as the Turkish Da Vinci. His most famous and most talked about work in the field of figurative abstraction is his sculpture Akdeniz.

Life He was born on June 17, 1921, in Edirne. His father, Fuat Bey, was a doctor and farmer, and his mother was Sevinç Leman Hanım. His father's distant ancestors were villagers who, after the Battle of Mohács in 1526, were relocated from Konya to the Balkans. His maternal grandfather, Mehmet Şerafettin Aykut Bey, was a revolutionary during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II and one of the founders of the Trakya Paşaeli Müdafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti. Between the years 1952 and 1954, the reliefs he created in the context of this project about the Battle of Sakarya (1921) had traces of the experiences that he had gained in Paris, where he studied Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian reliefs. With this group he produced works which advocated the collaboration between painters, sculptors and architects.

His work was awarded the second place at the 1954 Ankara State Exhibition, and the first place at the 1955 Ankara State Exhibition. In 1958, he undertook the construction of the Turkish pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. Upon the invitation of Scottish architect Ralph Erskine, whom he met during the six months they worked on the Brussels project, he went to Sweden to research forms for his architectural designs. Leaving his first wife and his job at the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy, he moved to Sweden in 1959.

In 1965 he bought the M/Y Hulda, a two-mast sailing boat built in 1905, which he restored to live and work in. He used this boat as a home and workshop until his death in 1986.

In 1967, he was accepted as a lecturer at the Stockholm School of Applied Arts. Scientific discoveries such as new geometric derivatives and windmills were registered in this period. He won the first prize in the competition for the development of an area in Sweden, Sundsvall, in 1969, and in 1970, the first place in the sculpture contest for a sculpture to be put in front of the Örebro Municipal Palace.

On December 30, 1986, he died at the age of 65 in Sweden's capital Stockholm. In line with his last will, his body was cremated and the ashes were spread in the Baltic Sea, where he spent a significant time of his life.

Koman's sculptures are found in the streets and squares of 20 cities, most of them in Stockholm.