THE BORUSAN COLLECTION EMBRACES A POSITION ON PAINTING THAT PROPOSES the painting to be something beyond a mere picture. The collection’s selection of paintings posits a reception of painting as “painting within itself” and “painting as such”. These two philosophical concepts emerged with modernism and the subsequent challenges that the medium of painting has faced with the development of photography, conceptual art, installation, new media, digital imaging techniques, and the world-wide-web. Thus, painting strived towards an articulation of its own language that would build on the basic parameters of its emergence on a “surface” and composed by the application of paint. The former concept led towards an obsessive relationship with canvas that raised fundamental questions regarding painting, and what it could manifest. Lucio Fontana cut the surface of the canvas to discover if there was something beyond it, Joseph Albers meditated on colours and basic geometrical structures, Ad Reinhart covered the whole surface of the canvas in black – like a tombstone (of painting). While the latter concept treated paint as a body applied on canvas where the surface of the painting became the place of application, Jackson Pollock dripped, Mark Rothko layered and Barnett Newman contemplated. The paintings in the Borusan Collection all share an active questioning of the medium of painting; working to expand painting’s horizons in various directions, while exploring the notion of its “flatness”.

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//See Borusan Art Collection Book for the whole text.//