Burhan Doğançay

Burhan Doğançay — Biography

For half a century, Turkish-American artist Burhan Doğançay photographed city walls around the world and turned the images into paintings and collages. He saw walls as a mirror of society; his best-known work grew out of that idea, the photographic archive Walls of the World and the Ribbons series that made his name in the 1970s and 1980s. He received the Presidential Grand Award for Culture and Arts, and the Doğançay Museum in Istanbul bears his name.

He trained in art with his father, Adil Doğançay, and with Arif Kaptan, and played football for Gençlerbirliği in his youth. He took a law degree at Ankara University in 1950, attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris between 1950 and 1955, and earned a doctorate in economics. After a brief diplomatic career he came to New York in 1962 and in 1964 devoted himself entirely to art, making the city his permanent home. In the mid-1970s he began the photographic project he regarded as his secondary one; the archive grew over four decades to about 30,000 images from more than 100 countries, and in 1982 it was shown at the Centre Georges Pompidou, then in Brussels and Montréal. In painting he worked mostly in collage and, to some extent, fumage.

His painting Mavi Senfoni (Blue Symphony) was bought by Murat Ülker in 2009 for 2.2 million TL. In 2006 the Turkish government gave his painting Trojan Horse to the OECD. He spent the last eight years of his life alternating between studios in New York and Turgutreis; he died in Istanbul on 16 January 2013 and was buried in Turgutreis at his own request.