Burhan Doğançay
Burhan Doğançay (born 1929 and died 2013 in Istanbul, Turkey) received his first art lessons from two well-known painters when he was still a child: his father Adil Doğançay and Arif Kaptan. Before he devoted his life entirely to art in 1964, he graduated from law school in Ankara and earned a PhD in economics from the University of Paris. While pursuing his doctoral studies, he also took art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. After he finished his academic education, Doğançay worked in the Turkish Ministry of Trade for a few years, during which he traveled to New York as a diplomat in 1962. His visit there marked the beginning of his professional art career, and the city became his chosen home until shortly before his death.
Doğançay’s artistic practice focused mainly on painting, collage, photography, and sculpture, in which he explored and documented walls in cities. He believed that walls have the ability to reflect the dynamics and identity of a city and illustrate current discourses in society. The artist captured the entire range of aspects of these urban contemporary witnesses in a fragmentary way: from symbols and graffiti, to posters, newspaper clippings, slogans, and doodles, all the way to structures and parts of the walls themselves. He combined these traces of anonymous, fleeting interventions on public surfaces to create new images and objects.
Over a period of almost fifty years, Doğançay would travel the globe and take pictures of city walls in the most diverse corners of the world, working with manifestations of the zeitgeist inscribed onto them in the form of fundamental socio-cultural, political, and economic changes. These walls form a kind of collective memory: they document existing and changing living conditions. Doğançay studied how they represent processes, and how different content collides on them, and embedded what he observed in a serial working method in which he translated his almost anthropological perspective of urban life into new, often ornamental realities. His collages and paintings are freely composed, like the works “Running Ink” (1974), “Midbergen” (c. 1968), “Walls V – Colophon page” (1969), and the lithographs in the collection of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, which he made in 1969. The impressions he gained while looking at walls and the notes he took are what form the raw material on which his works are based. They formed a stockpile of multifaceted references to street culture, which he transformed into careful compositions that dissolve the boundaries between the reality of life and art. Burhan Doğançay’s works were included in the exhibition “Hotspot Istanbul” at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in 2013. A museum devoted to his work was founded in Istanbul in 2004.
Nina Arnold
Doğançay’s artistic practice focused mainly on painting, collage, photography, and sculpture, in which he explored and documented walls in cities. He believed that walls have the ability to reflect the dynamics and identity of a city and illustrate current discourses in society. The artist captured the entire range of aspects of these urban contemporary witnesses in a fragmentary way: from symbols and graffiti, to posters, newspaper clippings, slogans, and doodles, all the way to structures and parts of the walls themselves. He combined these traces of anonymous, fleeting interventions on public surfaces to create new images and objects.
Over a period of almost fifty years, Doğançay would travel the globe and take pictures of city walls in the most diverse corners of the world, working with manifestations of the zeitgeist inscribed onto them in the form of fundamental socio-cultural, political, and economic changes. These walls form a kind of collective memory: they document existing and changing living conditions. Doğançay studied how they represent processes, and how different content collides on them, and embedded what he observed in a serial working method in which he translated his almost anthropological perspective of urban life into new, often ornamental realities. His collages and paintings are freely composed, like the works “Running Ink” (1974), “Midbergen” (c. 1968), “Walls V – Colophon page” (1969), and the lithographs in the collection of the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, which he made in 1969. The impressions he gained while looking at walls and the notes he took are what form the raw material on which his works are based. They formed a stockpile of multifaceted references to street culture, which he transformed into careful compositions that dissolve the boundaries between the reality of life and art. Burhan Doğançay’s works were included in the exhibition “Hotspot Istanbul” at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in 2013. A museum devoted to his work was founded in Istanbul in 2004.
Nina Arnold
Works by Burhan Doğançay
