Burhan Dogançay (1929-2013), Rocky and 14th Street subway station walls, 1999, 2 drawings, mixed media and collage on paper, signed and dated, 20x29 cm (each)Provenance: Gift of the artist in the late 1980sExpertise: The authenticity of these works has been confirmed by Mrs Angela Dogançay, who will include them in the Catalogue Raisonné of the artist being prepared under her directionWalls are one of the platforms for communicating society, its thoughts, hopes and hatreds. Witness to our societies and their changes, the artist Burhan Dogançay has transformed the collective vernacular into art. Walls are the starting point for his artistic reflection: 'Wall messages are constantly changing, new ones replacing old ones, old ones covered up or distorted by the elements. The whole human experience has been reflected on walls, beginning with cave drawings. In the artist's various works, in particular his Walls and Ribbons series from 1972 to 1989, the central element is the relationship between the flatness of the work and its surface. Just as walls, through their many interactions with people, develop a new volume towards the street, so the Walls and their accumulations of layers, and the Ribbons and their optical illusions, shatter their inherent flatness. Trained by his father Adil Dogançay and the artist Arif Kaptan, he has travelled to more than a hundred countries and their walls to meet societies and their populations. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at the British Museum, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Centre Georges Pompidou.