Estate of Bilge Friedlaender
Bilge Friedlaender (1934 - 2000) was a Turkish-American artist who extensively explored the sensual, spiritual connections through her artistic experiments of geometric abstraction. In her long and prolific career, such an exploration developed into her minimalist visual language: with extreme attention to the nuances of color and texture, exploration of shades of white, layered and torn paper, shadows cast by wire or edges, and painted illusions of shadows and edges that are so subtle that they are only revealed upon very close investigation.
In Friedlaender 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. The artist who grew up in Turkey was steeped in Islamic sacred numerology and Sufi mysticism. She also had a deep fascination with Japanese visual cultures, and the Ssian tradition of paper making; her works with fibers and organic materials and shapes were inspired by living in Papua New Guinea.
Her deep diving experience in 1974 led the artist to a deep shift in her practice - she now worked to “depict the spaceless-ness of space, paintings that are non-paintings,” in an effort to visually reflect her own spiritual experiences. In the next years she developed an extremely minimal but delicate repertoire of form that she used with poetic imagination. These works that seem extremely fragile, made with materials such as watercolors, pastel, and ink on handmade paper, threads, strings, and torn paper, at times draws our attention to the mutation of forms, and at times invite nuanced contemplations on our interdependency with nature.
She had been exhibited at 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. Following her 2023 solo exhibition at Sapar Contemporary, as part of a rediscovery of Bilge’s oeuvre, her works have been acquired by Flaten Art Museum at St. Olaf College, MN; RISD Museum, RI; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Menil Collection, TX. In 2023, Bilge had a solo exhibition at Daura Museum of Art at the University of Lynchburg, VA and is participating in an upcoming project at Harvard University and an exhibition at Martin Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College, PA in 2024.