İstanbul Modern presents a Retrospective of Burhan Dogançay

 

Between May – September 2012

"Fifty Years of Urban Walls"

For its new show,

İstanbul Modern presents a comprehensive exhibition of fifty years of work by Burhan Dogançay, one of the leading names of contemporary art in Turkey. Fifty Years of Urban Walls: A Burhan Dogançay Retrospective presents the 14 major facets of the artist’s work, now in prominent collections worldwide. Sponsored by Yıldız Holding, the exhibition displays Dogançay’s half-century-long artistic career. The show, which is curated by Levent Çalıkoğlu, will be held between May 23–September 23, 2012 in İstanbul Modern’s temporary exhibition hall.

 

Since the 1960s, Burhan Dogançay, who says “walls are the mirror of society”, has been exploring the social, cultural, and political transformation of modern and contemporary urban culture through walls. As an urban traveler, for half a century he has been mapping walls in various cities worldwide. From posters to slogans, and messages with sexual content to newspaper clippings, like an anthropologist he has been examining these surfaces that are open to all the interventions of time. He depicts the way personal narratives and messages shape walls in public spaces, and through social and political images, points to the social transformations in urban life. The diversity in Dogançay’s work comes from the series he treats using different styles and techniques.

Since his days in school Burhan Dogançay has been traveling to the four corners of the earth and exploring urban culture. Since the ’70s he has recorded with his camera walls in 114 countries. Recreating urban walls on the canvas surface, Dogançay’s 50-year-long odyssey proceeds parallel to his photographic career. He has compiled a photographic archive of urban walls around which his work is centered, and, drawing from this resource, he creates his ‘wall art’. Today the artist’s extensive archive exceeds 30 thousand transparencies. In 1982 a photography exhibition of Dogançay’s work entitled Les murs murmurent, ils crient, ils chantent… was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

His series “General Urban Walls” begun in 1963, serves as an introduction to both the exhibition and Dogançay’s wall art. Fifty Years of Urban Walls: A Burhan Dogançay Retrospective continues with the series “Doors”, “New York Subway Walls”, “Breakthrough”, “Ribbons”, “Cones”, “Housepainter Walls”, “GREGO Walls”, “Formula I”, “Double Realism”, “Alexander’s Walls”, “Blue Walls of New York”, and also “Framed Walls”, an ongoing series the artist started in 2008.

In 1965, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York purchased a work by Burhan Dogançay. This was the first time one of his works entered a permanent collection of a major museum. Today the artist’s works can be found in more than 80 museums worldwide, including The British Museum in London, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

With his work Ribbon Mania having recently been added to the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Burhan Dogançay is now the first contemporary Turkish artist to have entered this collection.

The exhibition is accompanied by a lavish catalogue, published by Munich-based Prestel Publications. It contains articles by exhibition curator Levent Çalıkoğlu, Brandon Taylor, professor of art history at the University of Southhampton, Richard Vine, senior editor at the magazine Art in America. Writer, editor, and graphic designer Clive Giboire’s article analyzes all of Dogançay’s series and examines the techniques developed by the artist