Ribbon Mania
Burhan Doğançay American, born Turkey
Inspired by the graffiti- and poster-covered walls of New York City in the 1960s, the Turkish-born artist Burhan Doğançay mined the expressive possibilities of street art over his half century-long career. The paintings in "Ribbons," a series he made between 1972 and 1989, are trompe-l’oeil collages, in which forms evocative of ribbons or slashed and torn paper seem to break through the plane of a wall and project into our space. In "Ribbon Mania" of 1982, the play of light and shade created by the painted forms and their cast shadows against a pale gray ground underscore the illusion of three-dimensionality. While the markings on the canvas at once suggest posters peeling from a wall, Doğançay’s “Ribbons" also recalls Islamic calligraphy.
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