IAIA is pleased to present Torn Time, the first institutional solo exhibition of Bilge Friedlaender (1934–2000) in the United States. This exhibition unveils two decades of Friedlaender’s work, tracing her unwavering relationship to nature through her diverse, profound and delicate approach to drawing.
Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Friedlaender’s decisive desire to become an artist landed her in New York in 1958, where she completed her master’s in painting at NYU. As a female immigrant, Friedlaender navigated an artistic landscape that perceived her as ‘other’, yet defied social expectation by remaining in the U.S. This exhibition explores Friedlaender’s engagement with the line and pace, exploring scale, nature, fiction and geometry, connecting with experiences of alienation and rapture.
In 1972, Friedlaender emerged from a deep-sea dive into The Tongue of the Ocean with a shifted perspective. Influenced by her metaphysical encounters with nature, her work evolved from figurative painting into an exploration of
the “spacelessness of space.” She began producing planar works, book-like objects which examined the materiality of paper. Friedlaender developed a disciplined reductive vocabulary packed with emotion: tear, string, square, line. Within this sparse language resides the potential for endless variation, and the characteristic transcendentalism of Friedlaender’s work that departs from American minimalism. Slits and tears in the paper make visible the invisible, the layers and fibers of the material evoking the unpredictability of
life. Friedlaender’s work speaks to a poetic geometry, interested in the infinite potential of the line.
The forces that drive Friedlaender’s work foreground the acts of expanding and shrinking, evidenced in her artist’s books, which must be unfolded and spread out to be experienced and then packed away again. Friedlaender invites the vastness of the universe to exist intimately within the boundaries of her work, without sacrificing the magnitude of its glory. By reorienting our understanding of space, she harnesses the possibilities of nature within her work. Through her deft grasp of minimalism, Friedlaender both ossifies and
dissolves boundaries, exploring the intimate and ethical potentialities of abstraction.
Press release from Institute of Arab and Islamic Art
Image: Bilgé. Blue Time. 1974. Watercolour and pencil on paper. 55.88 x 77.47 cm. Image courtesy of Sapar Contemporary
and the Estate of Bilgé
