Sculpture

During the period of drawing nearer to the West in the cultural sense, that started in the final years of the Ottoman period, there was a revival in the field of sculpture as there was in the other fields of art. The activities were also continued in the Republic period to develop the art of sculpture. Series of archaeological excavations, called "National Excavations", were made in order to unearth the sculptural heritage of former civilizations. Foreign masters in the field who were imported, instructed young talents, and successful students were sent abroad for education. In 1937, German sculptor Rudolf Belling was appointed the chairman of the Department of Sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts. Belling who served as a professor at the Academy until 1954 trained many students and continued to produce sculptures. He is the sculptor of the Inonu monuments at the Istanbul Taslik Park and on the campus of the Ankara University's Faculty of Agriculture. One of the most important sculpture exhibitions in Turkey was also realized by Belling at the Taskisla building of the Istanbul Technical University.

The first period in this field of art, which lasted until the 1950s, in which monuments and sculptures of Ataturk were given priority, was dominated by foreign masters such as Krippel, Canonica, Hanak, Thorak and Belling. However, Turkish sculptors had important successes in the monument competitions which started to be organized as of 1937. For instance, Ali Hadi Bara won the first prize and Zuhtu Muridoglu was placed second in the design competition for the Erzurum Monument , and Nejat Sirel won the first prize in the competition for the Manisa Monument in which foreign sculptors had also taken part.

Many of the sculptors who started their professional life in the 1950s, such as Hakki Atamulu, Yavuz Gorey, Kamil Sonad, Ilhan Koman, Huseyin Gezer and Turgut Pura, were the students of Belling. Even those sculptors whose works are mainly figurative have also experimented with figurative-abstract works. However, some of them, namely Ilhan Koman, Sadi Calik and Turgut Pura, produced mainly abstract sculptures. Among them, Ilhan Koman held many exhibitions abroad and won prizes in numerous competitions. Hadi Bara and Zuhtu Muridoglu influenced the Academy's Department of Sculpture after the 1950s. Abstractionist approaches and the use of various contemporary tools and techniques were characteristics of this period. Sculptors such as Tamer Basoglu, Kuzgun Acar, Gurdal Duyar and Namik Denizhan are the main representatives of this school. Kuzgun Acar, who won the first prize at the Paris Youth Biennial in 1961, produced some very interesting abstract sculptures. For instance, Kuslar (The Birds), an iron relief in front of the Istanbul Manifaturacilar Carsisi (Istanbul Textiles Bazaar), is his work. Mehmet Aksoy who brought new dimensions to figurative sculpture, Ferit Ozsen who produced abstract works with metal and stone material, Saim Bugay and Hayri Karay who attracted attention with their woodworks and Metin Haseki, are some of the other noteworthy contemporary sculptors.