Institute of Arab and Islamic Art, NYC, presents Bilgé's 'Torn Time'

The Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA), founded by Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, is presenting Torn Time, the first institutional solo exhibition of Bilgé (1934-2000) in the United States.

- Muhammad Yusuf, Features Writer

Opened in the institute's spaces in New York (May 6-Aug. 31), the show, curated by Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, unveils two decades of Bilgé's work, tracing her unwavering relationship to nature through her diverse, deep and delicate approach to drawing. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Bilgé's 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, she navigated an artistic landscape that perceived her as 'other' yet defied social expectation by remaining in the U.S.

The show explores Bilgé's engagement with line and space, exploring scale, nature, fiction and geometry, connecting with experiences of alienation and exaltation. In 1972, Bilgé emerged from a deep-sea dive into The Tongue of the Ocean, a deep water region in the Bahamas, with a shifted perspective. Influenced by her metaphysical encounters with nature, her work evolved from figurative painting to an exploration of the “spacelessness of space.” She began producing planar works, book-like objects which examined the materiality of paper.

She developed a disciplined, reductive vocabulary, packed with emotion, elements of which included tear, string, square and line. But inside the sparse language resides the potential for endless variation, and the characteristic transcendentalism of the artist's work that departs from American minimalism. Slits and tears in the paper attempt to make visible the invisible, the layers and fibers of the material evoking the unpredictability of life itself.