Bilgé: 1975

Curated by Barbara Stehle, Ph. D.

September 5, 2025 - October 13, 2025
 Opening September 5, 2025, 6-8 pm

Curator’s Walk Through September 20, 2 pm

Sapar Contemporary is thrilled to present its second solo exhibition of Bilgé, the Turkish-American artist Bilge Civelekoğlu Friedlaender, who preferred to be known as Bilgé. The exhibition brings together works on paper from 1975, a pivotal year in Bilgé’s minimalist practice, during which she ceaselessly innovated her visual language through geometry, repetition, and subtle materiality. This exhibition coincides with the artist’s retrospective at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in New York (on view through October 10, 2025). The two simultaneous exhibitions of Bilgé’s work mark a significant moment in her rediscovery by institutions and collectors.

In one of her last  journal entries of 1974, Bilgé writes:  “74 is the most remarkable, exciting year of my life - I feel sad seeing it fade into the past and feel anxious about 75. What has 75 in store for me? I wish it to be full of work and [the] success of my work.” Indeed, 1974 had been good to her, after sixteen years in the United States, Bilgé had finally broken into the New York gallery scene. Her presence had been noticed by critics and it gave her wings. Her production took off. 1975 would prove to be one of her most prolific years of the decade. 

This was an unexpected turn of events since a mere three years earlier, in a radical move, Bilgé had destroyed all her canvases. The only one to escape destruction – a geometrical composition with multiple squares -- was not in her studio. The artist was frustrated with the medium and unimpressed with the need for always bigger, larger, louder works: 

“I wonder why everyone is so concerned with size. Everybody wants to paint bigger and bigger. […] Man is preoccupied with space and size when he is constrained in small places, like apartments and congested cities. Whereas when you go down to the open ocean, you don’t think about size/space. You are there and you start expanding within, thinking about it. That is how it should be with paintings. A work should take you and let you expand regardless of its size.” 

She wanted to rethink what painting could be, and it was not going to be on canvas.

Upon seeing a selection of new talents at Betty Parsons gallery in 1974, the critic of the New York Times, Hilton Kramer, had singled out “the austere minimalistic drawings, with a touch of romanticism, by Bilge Friedlaender”. Kramer’s words were right on. Bilgé came out of the two years following her break up with painting on canvas by revealing her romantic soul while still maintaining the focus of a minimalist. The artist had developed an iconography of lyrical empty space inhabited by a few meditative lines, physical or painted, which summoned infinite horizons and a few loose geometrical forms. Her poetical works proposed that minimalism and romanticism were not antithetical. 

Bilgé had a contemplative nature and would register her sensations: “light will hang like a cool passing breeze, touch you, and float away” she writes in her journal. She would observe the sky and listen to its sound. She was touched by artists whose works expressed feelings about the natural world and a strong inner life. She loved Georgia O’Keefe’s sense of the monumental and admired Agnes Martin’s sensitive minimalism. On January 10th 1975 Bilgé made a structural sketch of a J.M.W. Turner watercolor “Boats at Sea”, 1835-40 and noted: 

“How many centuries the sky, the sea that far away horizon line has drawn people to itself. Some to sail it, some to paint it, some to write about it, some to write music to the sound and rhythm of the sea. Turner, in 1835 articulated all visually in a way that seems before and after his time. One unique vision - he must have lived his sea with all his being - because his pictures are consummated.”

Bilgé shared with Turner his love of the sea and fascination with the sailboats that navigated its horizons.  The artist had grown up between the port city of Iskenderun and Istanbul, a city surrounded by the Bosporus and near the Sea of Marmara. Water was an intimate environment for her, and she referred to it often in her works. Abstract silhouettes detach themselves against the sky, move in the mysterious light of the paper. Bilgé was not a traditional landscapist, but she shared through her abstract compositions a sense of nature’s expanse.  She was a great swimmer and often went diving, exploring the deep sea. During one of her dives, she had a mystical experience which changed her life. In the depth of the ocean, she perceived  the “spacelessness of space.” Time disappeared. Space emptied itself. She understood bareness and found in it something limitless rather than reductive. It was 1972. Bilgé started working solely on paper, looking to express the expanse of space with a new intimacy. 

As an art student at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, Bilgé had acquired a classical training. Drawing was an essential part of the teaching she had received, and it was something she loved doing. The artist could draw beautifully using any medium: watercolors, pastels, graphite etc. She knew all the tools of the trade. In New York of the 1970s, the practice of drawing was being reinvented and re-thought by post-minimalist artists as diverse as Michelle Stuart and Dorothea Rockburne who rubbed paper with earth, folded it sculpturally. Bilgé joined in, ready to experiment. 

Her material of choice was handmade paper. She would work on it and make things with it. She would choose it very carefully, considering its texture and dimensionality. She would get stacks of black and white sheets and use them for her subtle constructs. She loved working in layers, doing collages, book making and later on sculptural paper installations. Sheets would be superimposed, cut open, torn apart. Bilgé would use scissors to get a sharp line or use her hands to get more expression in her torn forms and lines. Paper became not only her paint support but also her primary material. Matisse’s cutouts are the only precedent I know of somebody devoting so much time to drawing lines with paper edges. 

By 1975, Bilgé had become a master of the tear. She knew paper fiber like no one else. Tearing paper has style. The breaking apart is a hand practice that creates unconventional lines.  With tears the artist could express exquisite softness, brutal separation, tenuous tension and more. She would  play with negative and positive space, color relations and oppositions. The rhythmic nature of it obsessed her. In February 1975 she wrote: 

“Rhythms – more must be said about rhythm

Rhythm in lines

Rhythm as TIME

RHYTHM AS TIME

LINE AS TIME

Music as time”

When she collaged forms, Bilgé paid special attention to their spacing, their interactions and the beats they created. Her compositions have musicality, sounds of silence and of waves crashing. With her watercolors, she invented a lyrical minimalism. The romantic in Bilgé came back again and again to the depiction of metaphysical seascapes. Her skies are vast, horizons infinite. One feels the measure of things but never in a mechanical way. Bilgé had a sophisticated and varied understanding of lines. We can perceive in them her unique humanity. Bilgé pulled lines far away from the grid and geometry. She had become a dissident minimalist. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fun she had playing with squares, her old friends. Bilgé dressed up her squares with polka dots, gave them different angles, disturbed their edges. She called them “Mutated Squares”, acknowledging that she had turned them into a new thing, a strange organic geometry. In one of her watercolors, she freed her squiggly squares, sending them flying over the ocean in an Agnes Martin like stripped sky. It is a delight. 

- Barbara Stehle Ph.D.

ABOUT ARTIST

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)

ABOUT CURATOR

Dr. Barbara Stehle is an art historian and independent curator. She worked at the Pompidou Center in Paris before moving to the US. She has given a Tedx talk about “Architecture as Human Narrative” and writes about Art, Architecture and Women’s contribution to the art historical field. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her exhibitions were reviewed in the New York Times and Art Forum amongst other publications.