Burhan Dogançay

the long version

This book, which is the third major published survey dedicated to Dogancay, is wholly devoted to his works on paper. Within this general category, it is neatly divided into: I: Drawings and sketches (pencil, India ink, crayon); II: Watercolors and gouaches; III: Fumages; IV: Collages; and V: Mixed media, subdivisions that partly overlap and, in their totality, encompass the years from the early 1950s into the new millennium, to represent the intense striving of half a century. Dogancay's wide-ranging works variously combine naturalism and good drawing, traditional qualities instilled by his father and early teachers, with a drive toward radical innovation derived from the Euro-American idea of "progress." He is a man living simultaneously in two worlds, and so a representative figure of our times. His work is pervaded by numerous contemporary dichotomies, East/West, old/new, bourgeois/bohemian, native/expatriate, collective/individual, illustration/sign, volume/flatness, image/text, fictive/real, whose oscillations give off intense artistic sparks. - Introduction.