Bilgé (Turkey/US, 1934 - 2000)

In Bilgé’s journals, she spoke of the universal human creations of the “line,” the “square,” and how they embody the human connection to nature. Her practice in 70s/80s became an intense laboratory where she experimented with a subtle but universal vocabulary of numbers, words, lines, dots, and shapes. Through these little known works she raised a question that has an especially profound significance now - the question of the non-Western origins of abstraction. Having grown up in Turkey, Bilgé's spiritual minimalism was influenced by Vedic and Islamic numerology, Sufism, and classical Turkish poetry. She also had a deep fascination with Japanese visual cultures, and the Asian tradition of paper making; her works with fibers and organic materials and shapes were inspired by living in Papua New Guinea. In addition, she engaged with the works of Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and especially Robert Motherwell, among her other contemporaries. 

"In the recurring motif of what she calls “mutated squares”, Bilgé further develops her search for expanded dimensionality to provide a dynamic appearance to otherwise static geometrical shapes. “How can you make a rigid square do something else?”, she asks. A square is constructed from equally long, strict lines; However, Bilgé’s lines collaborate to strike more flexible poses, as if the square they form was floating in space without gravity. What pose can a square, this collaboration of lines, achieve in collective? In Bilgé’s hands, the squares lift themselves out of the surface that carries them, they assume a materiality that is expressed in their postures. Guided only by their own inner tension and momentum, they warp, curve and float, not as abstractions, but as imaginations of a patch of material, with a character of stiffness or floppiness. In her juxtapositions of mutated squares, Bilgé evokes sequences of poses that unfold themselves and that entirely transcend any flatness, in space or in time."

- Işin Önol