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Burhan Doğançay (1929 - 2013) Click for Artist Information

"Trident"

About Doğançay's Ribbon Series:The Attack Series see Doğançay’s transformation from observing artist to speaking artist. For Ribbon Series, he definitively leaves covered wall surfaces; he begins to work in solid colors such as gray or light blue and white or black surfaces representing light and shadow. In these deceptively regular and disciplined works, Doğançay plays with light and shadow in a convincing way; however, at the heart of these works, the artist’s observation on the walls lies although his works seem to be more refinedand abstract. “Reality is not surface anymore but what lies behind it; objects that come out of the walls occupy the space we inhabit.” “Throughout his career, he’s been interested in tactile painting level where the objects reach up the audience’s space.” In Ribbon Series, works extending ahead of the surface present the struggle of volume in a powerful and afficient way. A large number of torn paper strips that come out of jagged tear hole at the background into our space or ribbons themselves or shadows create elegant patterns evoking the calligraphy. Soft-edged tears that Doğançay’s observed on the walls are pretty important for him; they bring the image in characteristic and depth. Just like the previous series by him, Ribbons Series is also can be considered as "trompe l’oeil" collage; it resembles collage but there are optical illusions. "Trompe l’oeil" is a technique to measure the talents of real painters and the way he applies this technique is the proof of his talent. Along with the metal shadow sculptures that he did in 80’s, Aubusson, Ribbons Series provide a basis for mural carpets.

Clive Giboire, “Kent Duvarlarının Yarım Yüzyılı”, İstanbul Modern, 2012, Sayfa: 142

Gouche on paper

75 x 56 cm

1978, signed

This work has a certificate signed by Mr. Yahşi Baraz.

Estimated:500.000TL - 650.000TL

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Burhan Doğançay

Burhan Doğançay

BURHAN DOĞANÇAY (1929 - 2013)

Born in Istanbul in 1929, Burhan Doğançay began his artistic training with his father, the well-known painter Adil Doğançay, and the Turkish artist Arif Kaptan. In 1950, Doğançay earned a law degree from the University of Ankara, Turkey, and in 1953 he was awarded a doctorate of economics from the University of Paris, while attending art courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (1950–55). Doğançay’s expansive practice mixed collage with abstraction, deploying painting, photojournalism, and the calligraphic in an enormous oeuvre that includes graphic art, sculpture, paintings, and photographs. He is best known for his fascination with urban walls as tableaux suggesting an imaginary history, recording the passage of time through the marks left by the elements and by anonymous city-dwellers.

In 1955, after a period spent making artwork in a naturalist vein, Doğançay left France for Ankara to serve in Turkey’s Ministry of Commerce. But it was living as a diplomat in New York in the early 1960s that would spark the transformation of Doğançay’s artistic practice. Specifically, while walking on 86th Street in 1963, Doğançay encountered what he called “the most beautiful abstract painting I have ever seen.”¹ In fact, it was a wall with the remains of a poster, a constellation of broken patterns that Doğançay immediately sketched (and later reworked into a painting). In 1964, he gave up his diplomatic career in order to dedicate himself to an art that often used the urban wall as a means of exploring the visual experience of texture, place, and memory. He also adopted a mode of photojournalistic social commentary in his photographs of cities all over the world. In addition to the major series of works on canvas General Urban Walls (1963–2013), he created the sculptural assemblages Doors (1965–2010), for which he made doors that look like dilapidated found objects. Other thematic series also offer perspectives on urban life, among them New York Subway Walls (1967–2002), Blue Walls of New York (1998–2004), and Alexander’s Walls (1995–2000). The latter was inspired by Doğançay’s visits to Alexander’s, an abandoned department store in midtown New York. The posters and graffiti that adorned this enormous boarded-up building were covered by black paper to make the structure less of an eyesore, but soon holes in the paper revealed what lay beneath. Doğançay’s interest in this spectral emergence of pattern and collage led him to create a series of sixty large, predominantly black paintings. Other variations on the urban wall include Detours (1966–95), a series of mixed media works of wood panels and canvas featuring signs and arrows, and Ribbons (1972–89), for which Doğançay painted tendrils of paper casting calligraphic shadows in an interplay of geometric forms.

Solo exhibitions of Doğançay’s work have been held at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1982); Köln Baukunst-Galerie, Cologne (1982); Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo (1989); State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg (1992); Brooklyn Historical Society, New York (2000); Kennedy Museum of Art, Athens, Ohio (2001); Dolmabahçe Cultural Center, Istanbul (2001); Siegerlandmuseum, Siegen, Germany (2003); and Ohio University Art Gallery, Athens, Ohio, (2010). In 2012, Istanbul Modern organized a major retrospective of Doğançay’s work. He received various awards, including a Medal of Appreciation from the Russian Ministry of Culture (1992) and the Turkish National Medal of the Arts for Lifetime Achievement and Cultural Contribution (1995). The Doğançay Museum opened in Istanbul in 2004 and features the work of the artist and that of his father. Doğançay died on January 16, 2013, in Istanbul.

1. Quoted in Brandon Taylor, “Doğançay’s World,” in Burhan Doğançay: Fifty years of Urban Walls, eds. Angela Doğançay and Birnur Temel, exh. cat. (Munich: Prestel, 2012), p. 18.