Estate of Bilgé (1934-2000)

(Bilge Civelekoğlu Friedlaender)

Bilgé (Bilge Civelekoğlu Friedlaender 1934-2000) was a Turkish-American artist who extensively explored sensual and spiritual connections through geometric abstraction, developing a minimalist visual language focused on color, texture, shades of white, layered and torn paper, shadows, and painted illusions. Like Zarina, Huguette Caland, and Etel Adnan, Bilgé contributed to the dialogue between Middle Eastern and American modernism, highlighting non-Western origins of abstraction. Influenced by Vedic and Islamic numerology, Sufism, classical Turkish poetry, Japanese visual cultures, Asian paper-making traditions, and experiences in Papua New Guinea using fibers and organic materials, her practice engaged with artists like Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, and Robert Motherwell. A pivotal shift occurred after a deep-sea diving experience in 1974, leading her to create "non-paintings" that depicted the "spaceless-ness of space," incorporating materials such as watercolors, pastel, ink on handmade paper, threads, strings, and torn paper. Her journals discussed universal human creations like the "line" and "square," embodying connections to nature, and her 1970s/1980s work served as an experimental laboratory using a vocabulary of numbers, words, lines, dots, and shapes, raising questions about non-Western abstraction origins.

Bilgé graduated from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in 1958, earned her MFA from New York University in 1959, and attended the Provincetown Summer Workshop from 1959 to 1960. She served as a professor at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

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)