About the Dogancay Museum
The Dogançay Museum was inaugurated in 2004, following a major restoration of the 150-year old building in which it is housed in the heart of Beyoğlu, thus becoming the first contemporary art museum in Turkey and the first monograph museum in Turkey.
Being exclusively dedicated to the work of Burhan Doğançay, and to a minor extent also to the art of his father, Adil, the museum provides a retrospective survey of the artist’s various creative phases from his student days up until the present.
The Doğançay Museum organizes a yearly painting competition among elementery schools in Istanbul, where 1500 schools pariticipate.
The museum has much collaboration with companies to bring Doğançay’s works on a new platform, to give his paintings a new life and audience. These have been with Villeroy & Bosch porcelains, Corvus wines, Zen Diamond and 100 % İstanbul just to name a few.
Born in Istanbul in 1929, Burhan Doğançay obtained his artistic training from his father, and Arif Kaptan, both are well-known Turkish painters. While enrolled at the University of Paris from where he obtained a doctorate degree in economics, he attended art courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Following a brief career with the government which brought him to New York City in 1962, Doğançay decided in 1964 to devote himself entirely to art and make New York his permanent home.
Doğançay was fascinated by urban walls and chose them as his subject. He saw them as the barometer of our society and a testament to the passage of time, reflecting social, political and economic changes, frequently withstanding the assault of the elements and the markings left by people.
In the mid-seventies, Doğançay embarked on what he saw then as his secondary project: photographing urban walls all over the globe. Over time, this project gained importance as well as content and after nearly four decades now encompasses 114 countries. These photographs are an archive of our time and the seeds for his paintings. With posters and objects gathered from walls forming the main ingredient for his work, it is only logical that Dogançay’s preferred medium has been predominantly ‘collage’ and to some extent ‘fumage’.
Doğançay re-creates walls in different series. In the 70s and 80s he gained notoriety with his interpretation of urban walls in his signature ribbons series, which in contrast to his collaged billboard works consist of clean paper strips and their calligraphically-shaped shadows. This series later gave rise to alucobond-aluminum shadow sculptures, some of which are in the permanant collection of the Doğançay Museum.
