Burhan Doğançay was born in Istanbul (then still officially called Constantinople) in 1929. Throughout his varied career, Doğançay accumulated several titles, including ground-breaking artist, celebrated academic, government official and even footballer (for the Gençlerbirliği football club), excelling in everything he undertook. Academically, he studied law at the University of Ankara (1950) and went on to obtain a doctorate in economics from the Université de Paris (1950–1955). Artistically, he nurtured his talent under his father, Adil Doğançay, and Arif Kaptan, both prominent figures in the Turkish Art scene. While in Paris, he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and more generally painted extensively throughout his studies.
After his studies, a diplomatic government position took him to New York in 1962, where new friendships, new circles and novel opportunities led him to settle in the city and dedicate himself fully to art. These early years were riddled with doubt, as Doğançay continually questioned whether he could ever live on his work. However, motivated allies, such as the Guggenheim’s director, Thomas M. Messer, encouraged him to persevere despite all the challenges of attempting an artistic career.
Eager to conquer New York, Doğançay sought inspiration from the walls of the city and found it. During a walk along 86th Street, he was struck by the artistic potential of the composition created by a wall’s colour, texture, shadows and the ripped posters and fading graffiti covering it. This discovery set the foundation of Doğançay’s creative process, namely drawing inspiration and aesthetic cues from encountered walls. He believed that walls bore the traces of a city’s mood, past, injustices, needs and hopes, which led him to journey across the streets of the world (he travelled to over 100 countries), reading their walls like an open book. He relentlessly documented these walls using maps and photography (see the 30 000 image Walls of the World archive) throughout his travels. This urban language was in turn reflected in his work through its composition, colours and aesthetic, which transformed the canvas into a wall of its own. The resulting artistic creation was the longest lasting series of Doğançay’s practice, General Urban Walls (1963–2013).
Doğançay’s abstraction was therefore a unique one, as it stemmed from damaged, degraded and faded figurative sources. The resulting images are graphic snapshots of urban environments across five continents. If, as the artist put it, walls are the mirror of society, his paintings could be described as a double reflection. Technically, Doğançay placed himself in the wake of the likes of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
In 1969, a fellowship granted by the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles (and secured thanks to Henry Geldzahler, then head of the 20th Century Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) allowed Doğançay to widen his technical horizons by giving him the opportunity to evolve in a new stimulating environment. He created 16 lithographs during this period.
The 1970s and 1980s solidified wider appreciation for his art. His creative series of the time, such as Ribbons, Cones, Doors and Alexander’s Walls, offered a wide view of Doğançay’s sensibility. In 1982, images from his exhaustive photographic archives were exhibited at a solo exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, offering a first peek behind the curtain of his artistic process, before travelling to the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Montreal.
He split the last years of his career between his studios in New York and Turgutreis, Turkey.
A museum solely dedicated to his work opened in 2004 in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district.
Doğançay passed away in 2013.
