Gülbin Ünlü's artistic practice celebrates the principle of the mash-up. In her interdisciplinary approach, which also includes collaborations with artists and the use of artificial intelligence (AI), she combines painting, photography, video, performance and music. Personal and collectively preserved memories play a central role in her work, with the underlying material being drawn from private and public archives. Ünlü developed a technique that creates a hybrid of painting and printing. To create new pictorial structures, she combines different pictorial levels by interweaving motifs and pictorial fragments from different sources and contexts. This approach allows her to work flexibly with different materials and on various painting surfaces. It also opens up her image production for the use in installation and sculptural and performative possibilities that transfer her method of layering disparate elements into one another into space. Ünlü’s working process can be categorized as the cultural practice of sampling. In a continuous reworking, she expands origins and overwrites them, connects different narrative lines and visualizes simultaneities, relationships, contexts and causalities. Ünlü’s works defy conventional categorization and classification. They manifest the complex conditions of a present that is characterized by fragmentation on an individual, social, political and cultural level.

Gülbin Ünlü lives and works in Munich, where she studied painting, drawing, sculpture and performance with Prof. Markus Oehlen and the guest professors John Jordan & Isabelle Fremeaux (Labofii), Simon Starling and Kim Noble at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich. She was awarded the Erwin and Gisela von Steiner Foundation Prize for her diploma in 2018. Since 2016, Ünlü has published books and music albums, most recently a monographic catalog published by Hammann von Mier Verlag. Her work has been exhibited at the Pinakothek der Moderne Munich in 2020 and the Berlinische Galerie in 2022, among others. She was awarded the Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst of the City of Munich in 2022 as well as the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis in 2023.