Biography
Formative Years and Education
Burhan Doğançay's childhood and youth were influenced by his father, Adil Doğançay (1900–1990), a military cartographer and painter who impressed upon his son the importance of drawing from nature.
In 1950, he received a law degree from the University of Ankara. Thereafter, he enrolled at the University of Paris, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in economics and attended art classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1955, Doğançay returned to Ankara and embarked on a diplomatic career for the Turkish government. His first exhibition with his father was in 1955 at the Ankara Art Lovers Club (Ankara Sanat Sevenler Klübü). Father and son held other joint exhibitions there in 1957 and 1959. These events immensely impacted Doğançay and prompted him to dedicate his life to painting. In 1964, he resigned from his government post to devote himself entirely to art and make New York his permanent home.
Life and career
When Doğançay came to New York in 1962, he set out to discover the city on foot with a focus on urban walls with their graffiti and torn posters marked by the elements; he interpreted these "walls" within a personal style in his collages and assemblages, his preferred technique. Around this time, urban walls became the fundamental leitmotif of his work.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was the first to acquire one of his works (Billboard) in 1964, within a year of its execution. Doğançay's meeting with the museum's director, Thomas M. Messer, started a long-lasting friendship between the two. In 1969, he received a fellowship from the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, where he created 16 colour lithographs, including a portfolio of eleven impressions titled Walls.
In 1975, Doğançay began establishing an archive of photographs of the Walls of the World without financial support. These photographs are purely documentary and reflect political, economic, social, and other significant issues.
Under the spell of the beauty of coincidental shadows created by the sun's rays reflected onto posters, Doğançay created his iconic Ribbon series in the mid-1970s. It was primarily the rhythmic structure of shadows, rather than the shadows themselves, that had attracted his attention, and they are reminiscent of the flowing lines of Eastern and Islamic calligraphy.
In the early 1980s, the Atelier Raymond Picaud in Aubusson, the well-known centre for tapestry weaving in France, chose 14 ribbon designs, based on which they produced striking hand-woven tapestries. The artist made his first aluminium shadow sculptures during this period. All these critical moments coincided with the creation of Doğançay's Ribbons series, which received the attention of art historians, museum curators, and collectors. Within abstract art, the Ribbons were based on non-Western traditions and consisted of colorful images that were not structurally repetitive. Doğançay had reached a crucial artistic phase after years of research.
Later, Doğançay began the Cones series, which shared a similar textural quality with the shadows in his Ribbons works. These Cones were inspired by the curled edges of torn posters, a phenomenon caused by human and natural forces. In pieces like Symphony in Blue, Magnificent Era, and Mimar Sinan (all 1987), Doğançay masterfully blended actual, curled paper with painted illusions of cones, blurring the line between reality and representation.
In 1990, Doğançay entered a new productive phase, creating several series, such as The House Painter, Double Realism, Doors, Formula I, Crego’s Walls, and Alexander’s Wall, all based on various three-dimensional experiments. The point is that the different series Doğançay created have an independent character, even though they focus on one theme: urban walls.
The artist proved this point by photographing graffiti, erotic drawings, symbols of love, and signs he discovered on urban walls in over 100 countries while pursuing his lifelong Walls of the Worldproject. Doğançay’s universal approach showed that the world is a small place, and despite differences in language, religion, or race, walls are an inevitable medium for expressing human emotions.
Retrospectives and Public Collections
After his first major retrospective in Istanbul in 2001, Doğançay had a comparatively larger retrospective at the Istanbul Modern in 2012. Important exhibitions followed posthumously at the Albertina, Vienna, in 2017, at the Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, in Geneva, in 2023, and at the Kunst Museum Winterthur in 2024.
Doğançay’s works are included in many museums and public collections worldwide. Ribbon Mania (1982) was the first work by a living artist from Turkey to be accepted into The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection in 2011.
