Bilgé Civelekoğlu Friedlaender (Turkey/US, 1934 - 2000) : Works on Paper, Books, Installations

Bilgé Civelekoğlu Friedlaender

(Turkey/US, 1934 - 2000) 

Works on Paper, Books, Installations

Bilgé (1934 - 2000) was a Turkish-American artist who extensively explored sensual, spiritual connections through her artistic engagement with geometric abstraction. In her long and prolific career, her exploration developed through her expressive minimalist visual language. In Bilgé's journals, she spoke of the universal human creations of the “line,” the “square,” and how they embody the human relationship to nature.  Bilge’s career launched with solo exhibitions of minimalist works in 1974 at Betty Parsons and Kornblee Galleries in New York. At the time she took inspiration from the work of Robert Motherwell, Georgia OKeefe, Eva Hess, Agnes Martin. Across her productive years her art was informed by the writing of Emily Dickenson, Nazim Hikmet, Virginia Woolf and Rumi.  Bilgé’s  transformative experiences in nature and with early earthworks set the stage for her later ecological works in the 1980s; making interventions in nature, and working directly with natural materials. She was part of New American Paperworks and exhibited alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Michelle Stewart and many others. She continued to exhibit internationally through the 1990s with works centering on awakening the human consciousness to our interdependencey with nature through exploration of ritual and the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh from an Feminist  Jungian position.  Exhibition venues included; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Second International Istanbul Biennial, Gallery Nev, Istanbul, American Craft Museum, NY, Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, University of Massachusetts Museum at Amherst, Corcoran Museum, Washington D.C., Arter, Istanbul, Neues Museum, Nürenberg.

Isin Önol is a curator based in New York and Vienna Before that, she led the Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art Istanbul as its director and curator. (2006-2009). Her curatorial research focuses on interconnecting archival information with oral histories to create platforms for collective memory through collaborative art practices. She is a research scholar at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University since 2014. She has been appointed as a guest professor and curator at University of Applied Arts, Vienna Austria for 2021-2023. She served as a lecturer at Montclair State University, Department of Art & Design for five years. Önol co-founded and directs the Nesin Art Village, an independent art school in Turkey. Önol holds an MFA from Sabanci University, Istanbul, a MAS from Zürich University of the Arts, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Isin Önol has been elected twice among the Board of Directors of Roberto Cimetta Fund for the period 2018-2021 and 2021-2024.

Isin Önol co-curated Bilge's first posthumous solo exhibition at Arter, Istanbul, together with Mira Friedlaender in 2016. Her recent exhibitions include Imagine Repair (New York), A Knot in the Throat: Foraging for Vanishing Present (Vienna), Thinking Food Futures (New York), Women Mobilizing Memory (Istanbul, Vienna, New York, Madrid), and When Home Won’t Let You Stay (Vienna). She was one of the curators of the International Sinop Biennial in 2012, 2014 and 2021. She has produced more than 60 exhibitions internationally, and published on the intersection of social justice and art.