Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line: Works from the 1970s
Curated by Isin Onol
February 23, 2023 - April 10, 2023
Opening February 23, 2023, 6-8 pm, 9 N Moore, NY, NY 10013
Sapar Contemporary is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Bilgé Friedlaender (1934–2000) in New York City, curated by Isin Önol. The exhibition, titled “Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line” is a collaboration with the artist’s estate, and is focused on rare and previously unseen works on paper from the 1970s. The exhibition features a selection highlighting a key period in Bilgé’s oeuvre. The works illustrate the artist’s elaborate visual vocabulary, manifested in her minimalist, sensual, mathematically defined, and yet dimensionality-expanding approach. Through floating squares and poetically ambivalent lines, in superimpositions of fractal paper tears and painted illusions, by contrasting blacks on black and by sculpting shadows of white, Bilgé takes us on an experiential, philosophical journey through her soulful universe.
Bilgé immigrated from her native Turkey to New York in 1958. After early solo shows in the 1970s at Betty Parsons and Kornblee Galleries in New York City, her work was featured internationally throughout the 1980s and 90s, at the Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Corcoran Museum, Washington D.C. Bilge spent the majority of her career in the U.S. and exhibited alongside many including Robert Rauschenberg and Michelle Stewart. In recent years, Bilge’s work received an increasing institutional and scholarly attention through carefully curated exhibitions at Arter, Istanbul, Neues Museum, Nürnberg, and Istanbul Modern. These exhibitions place Bilge in a distinctly female lineage of abstraction that goes back to the pioneers of this movement. She drew her inspiration from and dialogued with her contemporaries, among them Robert Motherwell, Georgia OKeefe, Eva Hess, and Agnes Martin. Other rich Eastern and Western influences that can be traced in her work are Turkish modern poets, Sufi mystics, sacred numerology, as well as Dada and 19th-century American poets and writers.
