Life

Mehmet Başbuğ was born in Diyarbakır in 1956. He trained in art education at the Bursa Institute of Education and in painting at the Gazi Faculty of Education, and earned his master's degree, proficiency in art and doctorate at the Institute of Social Sciences of Gazi University, Ankara.

After ten years in state schools he began teaching at the Gazi Faculty of Education in 1986. In 1994 he helped found the Faculty of Fine Arts at Süleyman Demirel University in Isparta, and from 1999 to 2009 he taught at the Faculty of Education of Selçuk University in Konya. From 2009 until his death he worked in Bishkek as dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and vice-rector of Kyrgyz-Turkish Manas University. In 2015 he became a full member of the Kyrgyz Academy of Arts. He was a founding member of the Ankara Painters' Association and of GESAM, the Turkish collecting society for visual artists.

He held more than eighty solo exhibitions in Turkey and abroad and won eighteen awards in national competitions. His paintings are in the collections of the Turkish Presidency, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the Ankara State Museum of Painting and Sculpture, of ministries, banks and universities, and in private collections from the United States to Japan. In 2017 the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey issued his painting "63" as a silver commemorative coin.

His principal subjects are the Turkish War of Independence, the women of Anatolia, migration and Turkestan. In scenes of villages, markets and coffeehouses, and in his horses, goats and fountains, he painted the everyday life of Anatolia.

He died in Bishkek on 7 July 2017.