Orhan Peker, 1926-1978

A pupil of the Austrian high school, Orhan Peker was a student of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was a member of the “Onlar” (“Ten”) group formed by Bedri Rahmi students and took part in its activities until 1952. Peker participated in Oskar Kokoschka’s Salzburg summer academy.

In his works, Orhan Peker frequently employs fields and stains of color. Instead of direct figurative depictions, he produces plain paintings, where color fields and textures evolve into shapes and figures.

The subject of “The Fisher Boy and Cats,” painted in Ayvalık in 1976, seems straightforward—two cats’ intense interest in a boy’s tray of fish—yet much more is happening in this deceptively simple scene. The narrow strip of gray and blue at the top reflects the gray of the soil at the bottom, and implies that the broad expanse of black and blue might be a vast sea. The two cats, the black one barely perceptible against the central band, signal the time of day: it is nearly dusk, the time when, as the saying goes, “a white thread cannot be distinguished from a black.” The boy, for his part, is equally intent on protecting his catch. The fisherman seems lost in thought until we realize that his stance and gaze are identical to those of the cats: calm, inert, waiting. No longer a boy and not yet a man, our fisherman is in a twilight zone of life.