About Bilge Friedlaender

Born in Eastern Turkey in 1934, graduated from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in 1958, earned her MFA from New York University in 1959 and attended the Provincetown Summer Workshop 1959-60.

Her career took off with exhibitions in 1974 at Betty Parsons Gallery and Kornblee Gallery in New York, continuing up to the 1990s at venues including University of Massachusetts Museum at Amherst, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Jessica Berwind Gallery, Gallery Nev and the Ercument Kalmik Museum. She participated in the Second International Istanbul Biennial (1989), the International Biennial of Paper Art, Düren, Germany (1992) and in group shows at venues such as the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, American Craft Museum, NY, and Borusan Art and Culture Center, Istanbul. Her work travelled the world with the shows “Paper as Medium,” 1978, “New American Paperworks” (1981-86) “Crossing Over/Changing Places” (1992- 1997).

Recent posthumous exhibitions; “Bilgé: Lifespan of a Horizontal Line,” 2023, “ecofeminism(s)”, 2020, “Border of Time” Neues Museum, Nürenberg (2018), “Words Numbers Lines”, Arter, Istanbul (solo, 2017), “Dream and Reality”, Istanbul Modern, (2011).

Friedlaender was a professor at Tyler School of Art, and at the University of Pennsylvania, both in Philadelphia. After 38 years living and working in the USA, Friedlaender returned to Istanbul permanently in 1996.  She died in 2000 in Istanbul.