Bilge Friedlaender's First US Institutional Solo Show at IAIA

The Institute of Arab and Islamic Art (IAIA) presents 'Torn Time: Bilgé', the first institutional solo exhibition in the United States of Bilge Friedlaender (1934–2000). The exhibition covers two decades of her work, highlighting her connection to nature through drawing. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Friedlaender moved to New York in 1958, earning a master's in painting at NYU. As a female immigrant, she navigated an art world that saw her as 'other' but chose to stay in the U.S. The show explores her engagement with line, scale, nature, fiction, and geometry, linking to alienation and rapture. In 1972, after a deep-sea dive into The Tongue of the Ocean, her perspective shifted. Influenced by metaphysical encounters with nature, she moved from figurative painting to exploring the 'spacelessness of space,' producing planar works and book-like objects examining paper's materiality. Her reductive vocabulary—tear, string, square, line—carries emotion and transcendentalism distinct from American minimalism. Slits and tears in paper reveal invisible layers, evoking life's unpredictability. Her artist's books must be unfolded to be experienced, inviting the universe's vastness into intimate boundaries. The exhibition runs at IAIA.