INSTITUTE OF
ARAB & ISLAMIC ART
Torn Time: Bilgé
Torn Time
BILGÉ
Curated by: Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani
May 6th - October 20th, 2025
IAIA is pleased to present Torn Time, the first institutional solo exhibition of Bilgé (1934–2000) in New York.
IAIA is pleased to present Torn Time, the first institutional solo exhibition of Bilgé (1934–2000) in the United States. This exhibition unveils two decades of Bilgé’s work, tracing her unwavering relationship to nature through her diverse, profound and delicate approach to drawing. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Bilgé,’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, Bilgé navigated an artistic landscape that perceived her as ‘other’, yet defied social expectation by remaining in the U.S. This exhibition explores Bilgé's engagement with the line and space, exploring scale, nature, fiction and geometry, connecting with experiences of alienation and rapture.
In 1972, Bilgé 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. Bilgé 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 Bilgé’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. Bilgé’s work speaks to a poetic geometry, interested in the infinite potential of the line.
The forces that drive Bilgé’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. Bilgé 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, Bilgé both ossifies and dissolves boundaries, exploring the intimate and ethical potentialities of abstraction.
Bilgé (1934 - 2000) also known as Bilgé Civelekoğlu Friedlaender was a Turkish-American artist who extensively explored sensual, spiritual connections through her artistic engagement with geometric abstraction. In her long and prolific career, her exploration developed through her expressive minimalist visual language. In Bilgé s journals, she spoke of the universal human creations of the “line,” the “square,” and how they embody the human relationship to nature. Bilge’s career launched with solo exhibitions of minimalist works in 1974 at Betty Parsons and Kornblee Galleries in New York. Bilge’s transformative experiences in nature and with early earthworks set the stage for her later ecological works in the 1980s; making interventions in nature, and working directly with natural materials. She was part of New American Paperworks and exhibited alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Michelle Stewart and many others. She continued to exhibit internationally through the 1990s with works centering on awakening the human consciousness to our interdependence with nature through exploration of ritual and the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh from an Feminist Jungian position. Exhibition venues included; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Second International Istanbul Biennial, Gallery Nev, Istanbul, American Craft Museum, NY, Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, University of Massachusetts Museum at Amherst, Corcoran Museum, Washington D.C., Arter, Istanbul, Neues Museum, Nürenberg.
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with Sapar Contemporary and the Estate of Bilgé.
Bilgé, Untitled (Cosmos Pastel II), 1975, Pastel, Pencil on Paper Courtesy of Sapar Contemporary & The Estate of Bilgé