İbrahim Balaban
Öküz Çeken (Pulling the Ox)
- Medium
- Oil on hardboard
- Dimensions
- 27 × 46 cm
- Viewing
- At the showroom — by appointment
On a yellow-green field two oxen — one orange, the other dark green — brace themselves before a wooden implement attached by a chain, their bodies built from angular planes. At the right a villager in a yellow shirt and green trousers leans back, hauling on a taut rope; sparse shrubs stand behind, while the ploughed earth in the foreground is woven from broken lines. A small work in which the theme of labour is built from angular forms and warm earth colours. The artist's signature and a date appear at the lower left.
About the Artist
İbrahim Balaban (1921, Bursa – 2019, Istanbul) is among the masters of social realism in Turkish painting. After village school he had no academy training; he came to painting through the encouragement of the poet Nâzım Hikmet, whom he met in Bursa Prison and called his "Poet Father". He opened his first solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1953 and showed more than two thousand works in over fifty exhibitions. The labour and daily life of the Anatolian peasant — oxen at the plough, the threshing floor, weddings and festivals — became his subject, and he recounted his years with Nâzım Hikmet in books including "Nâzım Hikmet'le Yedi Yıl" (Seven Years with Nâzım Hikmet). He was the father of the painter Nazım Balaban, also represented in our collection.
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