Burhan C. Doğançay (11 September 1929 – 16 January 2013) was a Turkish-American artist. Doğançay is best known for tracking walls in various cities across the world for half a century, integrating them into his artistic work.
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 1950, he received a law degree from the University of Ankara. While enrolled at the University of Paris between 1950 and 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.British Museum Artist Bio, retrieved 1 June 2015
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 to make New York his permanent home. He started searching the streets of New York for inspiration and raw materials for his collage and assemblages. He began to think it was impossible to make a reasonable living as an artist. Thomas M. Messer, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for 27 years, significantly influenced Dogançay, urging him to stay in New York and face the city's challenges.
In the 1970s, Dogançay started traveling for his Walls of the World photographic documentary project. He met his future wife, Angela, at the Hungarian Ball at the Hotel Pierre in New York. In 2006, a painting by Doğançay titled Trojan Horse was gifted by the Turkish government to the OECD in Paris. Dogançay lived and worked during the last eight years of his life alternating between his studios in New York and Turgutreis, Turkey. He died at the age of 83 in January 2013.Artnet: Chronology on Burhan Dogancay, retrieved 30 April 2015
Artistic contribution Since the early 1960s, Doğançay had been fascinated by urban walls and chose them as his subject. He considered them the barometer of societies and a testament to the passage of time, reflecting the emotions of a city, frequently withstanding the assault of the elements and the markings left by people.Metropolitan Museum Collection, retrieved 1 June 2015 It began, Dogançay said, when something caught his eye during a walk along 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.E. Flomenhaft (ed.), Doors and Walls, Tenth Avenue Editions, New York, 1994, p.243.
As a city traveler, for half a century he mapped and photographed 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.Obituary: New York Times, retrieved 1 June 2015 Part of the intrinsic spirit of his work is to suggest that nothing is ever what it seems. Dogançay's art is wall art, and thus his sources of subjects are real. Therefore, he can hardly be labeled as an abstract artist, and yet at first acquaintance much of his work appears to be abstract. In Dogançay'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 re-contextualised deconstruction of positions related to the nouveau réalistes. Dogançay may have started out as a simple observer and recorder of walls, but he fast made a transition to being able to express a range of ideas, feelings, and emotions in his work. His vision continued to broaden, driven both by content and technique.Guggenheim Artist Bio , retrieved 1 June 2015WHISPERING WALL II, Sotheby's; retrieved 10 January 2016
Walls of the World
In the mid-1970s, Doğançay embarked on what he thought of as a 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 also expressed contemporary times. The focus of his "encyclopedic" approach was exclusively directed toward the structures, signs, symbols and images that humans leave on walls. Here he found the entire range of the human condition in a single motif, without any cultural, racial, political, geographical, or stylistic, limitations. Dogançay got to the heart of his exploration when he said:
Walls are the mirror of society.Fifty Years of Urban Walls at Istanbul Modern, retrieved 24 April 2015
Doğançay's consequential execution, his radical thematic self-limitation and obsession with capturing what interested him most is comparable to other "documentarians" such as August Sander (portraits) and Karl Blossfeldt (plants). His 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; after four decades it encompasses about 30'000 images from more than 100 countries across five continents. In 1982, images from the archive were exhibited as a one-man exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; it later traveled to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal.Les Murs Murment, Centre Pompidou , retrieved 11 September 2015
Painting and collage
With posters and objects gathered from walls forming the main ingredient for his work, Dogançay's preferred medium has been predominantly 'collage' and to some extent 'fumage'. Dogançay re-creates the look of urban billboards, graffiti-covered wall surfaces, as well as broken or neglected entrances, such as windows and doors, in different series.Istanbul Modern, retrieved 1 June 2015 The only masters with whom he compares himself are Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns from the last heroic period of art, of which he was a part. Doğançay, however, has always preferred to reproduce fragments of wall surface in their mutual relations just as he found them, and with minimal adjustment of color or position, rather than to up-end them or combine them casually as in the Rauschenberg manner.
In large measure his practice has been one of simulation in the spirit of record-keeping, carried out with the collector's rather than the scavenger's eye. In many cases, his paintings evoke the decay and destruction of the city, the alienated feeling that urban life is in ruins and out of control, and cannot be integrated again., retrieved 1 June 2015 Pictorial fragments are often detached from their original context and rearranged in new, sometimes inscrutable combinations. His complex and uniformly experimental painterly oeuvre ranges 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 consist of clean paper strips and their calligraphy-like shadows. These contrast with his collaged billboard works, such as the Cones Series, Doors Series or Alexander's Walls. These brightly intense, curvilinear ribbon forms seem to burst forth from flat, solid-colored backgrounds. The graceful ribbonlike shapes take on a three-dimensional quality, especially as suggested by the implied shadows.LACMA Collections, retrieved 7 December 2016 This series later gave rise to alucobond–aluminum composite shadow sculptures and the series known as Aubusson Tapestries.MAK, Vienna, retrieved 9 June 2015
Tamarind lithography
In 1969, Henry Geldzahler, then head of 20th Century Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, secured a fellowship for Doğançay at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The 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. Doğançay created sixteen lithographs, including a suite of eleven impressions titled Walls V. These marked a turning point in his career as they are essentially a dialogue with flatness.Tamarind Institute, Los Angeles, retrieved 30 April 2015 At the workshop, in part because of the medium, he was obliged to relinquish his casual approach, inspired by his raw subject matter, in favor of organizing his work graphically. This imposed discipline helped him to create arresting new effects that led to more defined flat areas and brighter colors within the images. Doğançay created a new resolution between subject and method, and was a profound influence on his future evolution as an artist. A canon of high-colored tonality and visual impact has remained for him the essence of urban contradiction which he wants to share with viewers of his works.
Aubusson Tapestry
In Paris, Doğançay was introduced to Jean-François Picaud, owner of L'Atelier Raymond Picaud in Aubusson, France. Fascinated by Dogançay's Ribbons series and believing they would be ideal tapestry subjects, he invited 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". The first three Dogançay tapestries woven in 1984 were an immediate critical success.
Art market
In November 2009, one of Doğançay'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 development of his iconic Breakthrough and Ribbon series and as an exhilarating 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: A Selection from the Collection, retrieved 13 April 2019 Istanbul Modern commissioned composer Kamran Ince to set Mavi Senfoni to music. The solo piano piece was premiered by Huseyin Sermet on 26 June 2012.Symphony in Blue, retrieved 11 May 2015
In May 2015, Doğançay's painting Mavi Güzel (Blue Beauty) from the Ribbon Series sold for TL 1,050,000 (US$390’000) at Antik AS in IstanbulMemleket, Mavi Güzel, retrieved 11 May 2015
Doğançay Museum The Doğançay Museum is exclusively dedicated to the work of Burhan Doğançay, and to a minor extent also to the art of his father, Adil. It provides a retrospective survey of the artist's various creative phases from his student days up to his death, 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. The museum is closed.
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,Stonewall, Today's Zaman , retrieved 9 June 2015 The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Works in public collections (selection)
1964: Billboard, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum 1964: Yankees and Beatles, London, Tate Modern