Bilgé (Turkey/US, 1934 - 2000)

"Bilgé’s paper works, just like landscapes, are formed by strata, that is, layers of materials that got torn, warped, stacked, patterned, or coated over time. Bilgé’s stratified paper works — torn, textured, painted, marked with pencil, folded and superimposed — may appear as illusions or ambiguous percepts. Much rather, however, they are invitations to not merely observe them from their visual far-field, their “outer space”, but to imagine experiencing them in the way an ant-sized jogger would, who is fortunate enough to enjoy a run across their surface. Just like a jogger would sense the tactile transition from an elastic and absorbent surface to a hard and smooth one, Bilgé works to articulate and translate those characters of her materials through her interventions, in a way that re-organizes our visual sense: She paints in four shades of white, continues a pencil line with a string, allows a drawn, flat square to develop into a separate, mutated object, casts a real shadow or paints the illusion of one: Her vocabulary seems determined to redirect our tendency to come to quick conclusions from high altitude using hawk-eyed vision into a form of ant-like perception, a new, hybrid visual-tactile sense."

- Işin Önol

The artist’s exhibitions included solo and group shows from 1974 to the 1990s at venues such as Betty Parsons Gallery (New York, 1974), Kornblee Gallery (New York, 1974), University of Massachusetts Museum at Amherst, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Ercument Kalmik Museum, the Second International Istanbul Biennial (1989), International Biennial of Paper Art (Düren, Germany, 1992), Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto, Japan), American Craft Museum (New York), and Borusan Art and Culture Center (Istanbul). She participated in traveling shows like “Paper as Medium” (1978), “New American Paperworks” (1981–1986), and “Crossing Over/Changing Places” (1992–1997). Posthumous exhibitions featured “Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line” at Sapar Contemporary (2023), a solo at Daura Museum of Art (University of Lynchburg, VA, 2023), a retrospective at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (NYC), “Border of Time” at Neues Museum (Nürenberg, 2018), “Words Numbers Lines” at Arter (Istanbul, solo, 2017), and “Dream and Reality” at Istanbul Modern (2011).

Bilgé’s artworks are held in the following museum collections: Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College (Minnesota), RISD Museum (Rhode Island), Museum of Fine Arts Boston (Massachusetts), The Menil Collection (Texas), Harvard University, The Broad Museum at Michigan State University, University of Massachusetts, Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto, Japan), American Craft Museum (New York), Borusan Art and Culture Center (Istanbul), University of Massachusetts Museum at Amherst, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Ercument Kalmik Museum, Neues Museum (Nürenberg), Arter (Istanbul). She currently has a retrospective at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in NYC.