Open Your Eyes, George Bush

Urban walls, and the signs, symbols, and posters on them, were inspirations to Doğancay since his arrival in New York City in the early 1960s, after an earlier period living in Paris. Seeing in them an expression of the social, political, and cultural climate of the day, he used motifs he found on them in his works.

“I see beauty in decaying and textured walls, mostly in poor neighborhoods,” he wrote in 2008. “The walls I am drawn to have been worked on by nature and by human beings, so that they provide a mirror of their respective neighborhoods. They are speaking walls, where humans express their frustrations and aspirations. The other thing is that wall messages are constantly changing, new ones replacing old ones, old ones being covered up or distorted by the elements. By contrast, walls in affluent neighborhoods are most of the time spotlessly clean. They are sterile and lifeless and provide no inspiration.”