Burhan Doğançay was born in Istanbul in 1929 as the son of the well-known painter and map officer Adil Doğançay.

Doğançay, who turned to art with the encouragement of his father, started to work in this direction and started art studies at La Grande Chaumiere in Paris. When he finished his doctorate and returned to Ankara, and opened joint exhibitions with his father. In 1961, five of his paintings were accepted to the 22nd State Painting and Sculpture Exhibition. He then went to New York in 1962.

In 1964, the director of the Guggenheim museum, Thomas Messer, took one of the artist’s works into the museum collection.

In the same decade, he started the “Walls” series, which is an important source of inspiration, which will start with the walls of New York. The walls reflected “everything” behind the rapidly passing life. The artist, who set out from here in 1975, started the World Walls photography project, which will cover 114 countries. It was exhibited for the first time under the name ”.

In 1983, the artist’s designs began to be woven as tapestries from Aubusson, the famous carpet center of France. 19 large-format photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge, which underwent major repairs in 1986, were exhibited at JFK International Airport for nearly two years at New York City’s centennial celebrations (1998). Later, these photographs were published as a book under the name “Walls of the World”. In 2001, with the support of the Nejat Eczacıbaşı Foundation, he held his first retrospective exhibition in Istanbul Dolmabahçe Palace. In June 2003, the artist’s work “Respect for Calligraphy” was hung in the new European Parliament building in Brussels.

Burhan Doğançay’s works surpassed the million TL threshold in the 2000s, making the artist the most expensive Turkish artist. Doğançay’s works, produced in many different series throughout his career such as Cones, Ribbons, Torn, Doors, Alexander’s Walls, Grego, and New York Subway Walls, are in important collections around the world. The most important of these collections are:

USA: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Solomon, R. Guggenheim Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, Walker Art Center, Cleveland Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum, The Getty Center, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Kennedy Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Art, St. Louis Art Museum, The Library of Congress, The National Gallery of Art, Weisman Art Museum Minneapolis, Yale University Art Gallery, Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Norton Simon Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art

Germany: Pinakothek der Moderne, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Museum Folkwang, Sprengel Museum, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Museum Morsbroich

Austria: Albertina, Austrian Belverede Gallery, MUMOK Stiftung Ludwig, Museum der Moderne Salzburg

Belgium: Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts, European Parliament

Great Britain: Tate Modern, British Museum

Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

France: Center Georges Pompidou, Museé de Grenoble, Musee d’Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, La Méca – Frac Aquitaine

Sweden: Moderna Museet

Switzerland: Kunsthaus Zürich, Kunstmuseum Basel, Kunstmuseum Bern, Musée d’art et d’histoire Genève, Center Pasqu’Art Biel, Kunstmuseum Winterthur, MAMCO – Musée d’art moderne et contemporain Geneva

Japan: The Museum of Modern Art Ibaraki

Canada: Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

Russia: State Russian Museum

Turkey: Istanbul Modern, Doğançay Museum, Hacettepe University, Ataturk University Faculty of Fine Arts Museum, Odunpazari Modern Museum

Jordan: National Gallery of Fine Arts

Greece: Benaki Museum