Fifty Years Of Urban Walls A Burhan Doğançay Retrospective

Since the early 1960s, Burhan Doğançay examined the social, cultural and political transformation of modern and contemporary urban culture through the use of walls. As an urban traveller, he had been tracking walls in various cities across the world for almost half a century. With the guise of an anthropologist, Doğançay examined these surfaces that are open to all manners of contemporary interventions ranging from posters to slogans, and messages with sexual content to newspaper clippings. Doğançay’s works with different techniques and styles were positioned in both a historical and contemporary ground through their incorporation of the icons of popular culture and political symbols.

“Fifty Years of Urban Walls: A Burhan Doğançay Retrospective” stood as an anthology for Doğançay’s last 50 years of work. With works that range from small sized pieces to big canvases, and installations that ran beyond the walls, to various materials and pursuits, this exhibition unrolled the background to Doğançay’s ways of working. The exhibition gathered together 14 distinct series and periods of time with works coming from different collections all over the world. The accompanying catalogue presented images of works along with explanatory texts, which provide different perspectives to his ouevre while documents and photographs on Doğançay’s life alludes to his urban traveller identity.

Curator: Levent Çalıkoğlu