Burhan Doğançay

Burhan C. Doğançay (11 September 1929 – 16 January 2013) was a Turkish-American artist.[1]

Biography

Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Burhan Dogançay obtained his artistic training from his father Adil Doğançay, and Arif Kaptan, both well-known Turkish painters. In his youth, Dogançay played on the Turkish Gençlerbirliği soccer team. In 1950, he received a law degree from the University of Ankara. While enrolled at the University of Paris between 1950-1955 from where he obtained a doctorate degree in economics, he attended art courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. During this period he continued to paint regularly and to show his works in several group exhibitions. Soon after his return to Turkey, he participated in many exhibitions, including joint exhibitions with his father at the Ankara Art Lovers Club.

Following a brief career with the government (diplomatic service) which brought him to New York City in 1962, Dogançay decided in 1964 to devote himself entirely to art and make New York his permanent home. He starts searching the streets of New York for inspiration and raw materials for his collage and assemblages. Despite working hard, it seems impossible to make a reasonable living. Thomas M. Messer, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for 27 years, significantly influences Dogançay’s career, urging him to stay in New York and face the city’s challenges. In the 1970s, he starts traveling for his "Walls of the World" photographic documentary project and meets his future wife, Angela, at the Hungarian Ball at the Hotel Pierre, New York. Dogançay worked and divided the last eight years of his life between his studios in New York and Turgutreis, Turkey, until his death at the age of 83 in January 2013.[2]

Artistic contribution

Since the early 1960s, Dogançay had been fascinated by urban walls and chose them as his subject. He saw them as the barometer of our society and a testament to the passage of time, reflecting the emotions of the city, frequently withstanding the assault of the elements and the markings left by people. It began, Dogancay said, when something caught his eye during a walk stroll down 86th street in New York:

It was the most beautiful abstract painting I had ever seen. There were the remains of a poster, and a texture to the wall with little bits of shadows coming from within its surface. The color was mostly orange, with a little blue and green and brown. Then, there were the marks made by rain and mud[3]

As a city traveler, for half a century he has been mapping walls in various cities worldwide. In this context, urban walls serve as documents of the respective climate and zeitgeist, as ciphers of social, political and economic change. In Dogancay's approach, the serial nature of investigation and the elevation of characteristic elements to form ornamental patterns are essential. Within this, he formulates a consistent continuation of decollagist strategies - effectively the recontextualised deconstruction of positions related to the nouveau réalistes.

Walls of the World

In the mid-1970s, Dogançay embarked on what he saw then as his secondary project: photographing urban walls all over the globe. These photographs - which Dogançay called "Walls of the World" - are an archive of our time and the seeds for his paintings, which in and by themselves are also documentary of the era in which we live. The focus of his "encyclopedic” approach was exclusively directed towards the structures, signs, symbols and images humans leave on walls. This was not due to lack of originality, but because it is here where he found the entire range of the human condition in a single motif, without any cultural, racial, political, geographical, or stylistic, limitations. Dogançay himself got to the heart of his exploration by stating:

Walls are the mirror of society[4]

Dogançays pictures are not snapshots but elaborate segmentations of surfaces, subtle studies of materials, colors, structures and light, sometimes resembling monochromies in their radical reductionism. Over time, this project gained importance as well as content and after four decades now encompasses about 30'000 images from over 100 countries across five continents.

Painting and Collage

With posters and objects gathered from walls forming the main ingredient for his work, it is only logical that Dogançay’s preferred medium has been predominantly ‘collage’ and to some extent ‘fumage’. Dogançay re-creates walls in different series. The only masters with whom he compares himself are those from the last heroic period of art that he experienced and in which he was an active participant, notably Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. So the diversifications of his complex and uniformly experimental painterly oeuvre will always range from photographic realism to abstraction, from pop art to material image/montage/collage. In the 1970s and 1980s he gained fame with his interpretation of urban walls in his signature ribbons series, which in contrast to his collaged billboard works such as the Cones Series, Doors Series or Alexander's Walls consist of clean paper strips and their calligraphically-shaped shadows. This series later gave rise to aluminum composite shadow sculptures and Aubusson Tapestries.

Tamarind Lithography

In 1969, Henry Geldzahler, then head of the 20th Century Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art secured for Dogancay a fellowship at the Tamarind Litography Workshop in Los Angeles. This workshop, founded by June Wayne, was a ten-year project, attended by approximately seventy artists - among them were Ed Ruscha, Jim Dine, Josef Albers and Louise Nevelson - between 1960 and 1970, conceived to promote lithography in the USA. Dogancay created sixteen lithographs, including a suite of eleven impressions titled "Walls V". These marked a turning point in his career as they essentially are a dialogue with flatness.[5]

Aubusson Tapestry

In Paris, Dogancay is introduced to Jean-François Picaud, owner of L’Atelier Raymond Picaud in Aubusson, France. Fascinated by Dogançay’s Ribbons series as ideal tapestry subjects, he instantly invites Dogançay to submit several tapestry cartoons. In the words of Jean-François Picaud “the art of tapestry has found its leader for the 21st century in Burhan Dogançay”.[2] The first three Dogançay tapestries woven in 1984 are an immediate critical success.

Art Market

In November 2009, one of Dogançay's paintings, Mavi Senfoni (Symphony in Blue), was sold in auction to Murat Ülker for US$1,700,000. This collage relates to an impressive cycle of works within the Dogançay oeuvre, called Cones series, that evolved as a deliberative of his iconic Breakthrough and Ribbon series and as an exhilarant exploration of the urban space. Together with its two sister works, Magnificent Era (collection of Istanbul Modern) and Mimar Sinan (private collection), Symphony in Blue is one of the largest and most expressive works in which Dogançay enters into a dialogue with the history of Turkey. It was executed in 1987 for the first International Istanbul Biennial. Istanbul Modern commissioned composer Kamran Ince to set Mavi Senfoni to music. The solo piano play was premiered by Huseyin Sermet on June 26, 2012.

Doğançay Museum

Being exclusively dedicated to the work of Burhan Doğançay, and to a minor extent also to the art of his father, Adil, the Doğançay Museum provides a retrospective survey of the artist’s various creative phases from his student days up until the present, with about 100 works on display. Established in 2004, the Doğançay Museum in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district is being considered to be Turkey's first contemporary art museum.

Doğançay's works are in the collections of many museums around the world including New York's MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well as National Gallery of Art in Washington, MUMOK in Vienna, Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Istanbul Modern in Istanbul, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Works (selection)

Awards

Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions (selection)

Group Exhibitions (selection)

References

  1. ↑ "Ressam Burhan Doğançay vefat etti" (in Turkish). Bloomberg HT. 16 January 2013. Retrieved 16 January 2013.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Artnet: Chronology on Burhan Dogancay, retrieved 30 April 2015
  3. ↑ E. Flomenhaft (ed.), "Doors and Walls", Tenth Avenue Editions, New York, 1994, p.243.
  4. ↑ Fifty Years of Urban Walls at Istanbul Modern, retrieved 24 April 2015
  5. ↑ Tamarind Institute, Los Angeles, retrieved 30 April 2015

External links