Deals with the artist's consideration of the environment and personal artistic language. Internet: Bilge Friedlaender, 65, a Turkish-born artist known for combining natural materials into delicate arrangements and renderings, died of brain cancer in April 2000 in Istanbul.Mrs. Friedlaender, who lived in Germantown during the years she worked and taught in Philadelphia, had her pastel drawings, two-dimensional wall hangings, abstract sculptures, and minimalist installations exhibited at several venues in the region. They included Old City galleries, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Beaver College, Moore College of Art and Design, and the Horticultural Center and Arboretum in Fairmount Park. She had solo exhibitions in New York; Boston; Kyoto, Japan; and Istanbul. Her work also was shown as part of group exhibitions in several cities, including Washington and Munich, Germany. Mrs. Friedlaender was an assistant professor who taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1983 until 1993. She also was a visiting artist at Moore in 1977-78, and she taught at Temple University's Tyler School of Art - part time in 1979-80, then as an assistant professor in 1980-81. Mrs. Friedlaender used natural materials such as bark, shells, feathers, twigs, string, handmade paper and beeswax in her renderings. "The simpler the tools, the more varied the possibilities for expression," she wrote in her notebook. Still, some critics found her art complex. In 1976, a reviewer described her paper works as "sensitive explorations of edge, interval, and the play between natural fibers and those changed by painted opacities so even or dense as to deceive our perception of surface - treated or untreated, paint or paper?" Born in Istanbul, Mrs. Friedlaender graduated from Robert College in Istanbul in 1955 and earned a certificate from Istanbul's Academy of Fine Arts in 1958, when she emigrated to New York. There, she received a master's degree from New York University in 1959. She lived in several places, including Cambridge, Mass., before moving to Philadelphia in 1977. Her last exhibition in Philadelphia was in 1993, when she left the city for upstate New York. In 1996, Mrs. Friedlaender returned to Istanbul, where she taught art and yoga and produced three solo exhibitions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.