Born in Istanbul, Turkey, Burhan Dogançay obtained his artistic training from his father Adil Doğançay, and Arif Kaptan, both well-known Turkish painters.

While enrolled at the University of Paris between 1950 and 1955, from where he obtained a doctorate degree in economics, he attended art courses at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.

Thomas M. Messer, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum for 27 years, significantly influenced Dogançay, urging him to stay in New York and face the city's challenges.

He considered them the barometer of societies and a testament to the passage of time, reflecting the emotions of a city, frequently withstanding the assault of the elements and the markings left by people.

Dogançay may have started out as a simple observer and recorder of walls, but he fast made a transition to being able to express a range of ideas, feelings, and emotions in his work.

Here he found the entire range of the human condition in a single motif, without any cultural, racial, political, geographical, or stylistic, limitations.

[10]Dogancay's consequential execution, his radical thematic self-limitation and obsession with capturing what interested him most is comparable to other "documentarians" such as August Sander (portraits) and Karl Blossfeldt (plants).

His pictures are not snapshots but elaborate segmentations of surfaces, subtle studies of materials, colors, structures and light, sometimes resembling monochromies in their radical reductionism.

Dogancay, however, has always preferred to reproduce fragments of wall surface in their mutual relations just as he found them, and with minimal adjustment of color or position, rather than to up-end them or combine them casually as in the Rauschenberg manner.

In many cases, his paintings evoke the decay and destruction of the city, the alienated feeling that urban life is in ruins and out of control, and cannot be integrated again.

In the 1970s and 1980s, he gained fame with his interpretation of urban walls in his signature ribbons series, which consist of clean paper strips and their calligraphy-like shadows.

The workshop, founded by June Wayne, was a ten-year project, attended by approximately seventy artists – among them were Ed Ruscha, Jim Dine, Josef Albers and Louise Nevelson – between 1960 and 1970, conceived to promote lithography in the USA.

Dogancay created sixteen lithographs, including a suite of eleven impressions titled Walls V. These marked a turning point in his career as they are essentially a dialogue with flatness.

[16] At the workshop, in part because of the medium, he was obliged to relinquish his casual approach, inspired by his raw subject matter, in favor of organizing his work graphically.

This imposed discipline helped him to create arresting new effects that led to more defined flat areas and brighter colors within the images.