Burhan Cahit Doğançay was born in Istanbul in 1929 and educated in both law and art in Paris. He has lived in New York for over forty years. Burhan Doğançay, who divided his time between homes in Istanbul and New York, was the first contemporary Turkish artist to have his work included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He was primarily known for a body of work that grew out of his fascination with urban walls, which had a special meaning to him. Walls serve as a testament to the passage of time, reflecting social, political and economic change. They also bear witness to the assault of the elements and to the markings left by people. No other artist has explored urban walls with the same passion and intensity as Doğançay. In addition to painting, his major life achievement had been to relate art to a deeper understanding of humanity. By photographing urban walls of the world, he assembled a unique archive of some 40,000 slides of walls in over 100 countries during the past three decades.

He traveled for years collecting wall images from more than 500 cities to make the paintings and collages he presented at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 1982 in a one-man exhibition titled “Walls That Whisper, Shout and Sing.”

Doğançay was the recipient of numerous awards. Most notable was the Lifetime Achievement Award, presented in 1995 by the President of the Republic of Turkey. His work appeared in numerous publications, the most recent one Urban Walls with text by Brandon Taylor (Hudson Hills Press, 2008) was awarded a Gold medal by the IAPHC. Exhibited worldwide, Doğançay’s work is represented in prominent museum and corporate collections around the world.

Being exclusively dedicated to the work of Burhan Doğançay, and to a minor extent also to the art of his father, Adil, the Doğançay Museum provides a retrospective survey of the artist’s various creative phases from his student days up until the present. With about 100 works on display. Upon its opening the Doğançay Museum in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district has been considered to be Turkey's first contemporary art museum.

Doğançay's works is in the collection of many museums around the world including New York's MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as well asNational Gallery of Art in Washington, MUMOK in Vienna, Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Istanbul Modern in Istanbul, The Israel Museum in Jerusalem and The State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.

Doğançay produced some 4,000 paintings throughout his career and in November 2009, the artist's painting “Mavi Senfoni” (Blue Symphony) sold for TL 2.2 million ($1.46 million) on auction, breaking the record for the highest price for a painting by a living Turkish artist. Most recently, the artist's “Big Spider Web” painting became the top seller in the Beyaz Müzayede auction house's first sale of the season.

Burhan Doğançay passed away in 2013 when he was 84 years old.