Gülbin Ünlü's artistic practice celebrates the principle of the mash-up. In her interdisciplinary approach, which 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 underlying material drawn from private and public archives. Ünlü developed a hybrid technique between painting and printing. To create new pictorial structures and textures, the artist compounds different types of fabrics and interweaves motifs and image fragments from distinct sources and contexts. This specific artistic procedure allows her to work flexibly with contrasting materials and on various painting surfaces, thus opening her imagery for the use in spatial installations as well as for sculptural and performative possibilities. The artist transfers her method of layering and merging disparate elements into the three-dimensional space and the temporal dimension. Ünlü’s working process can be read considering the cultural practice of sampling. In a continuous reworking, she expands origins and overwrites them, connects different narrative lines and visualizes simultaneities, relationships, circumstances and causalities. Ünlü’s works defy conventional categorization and classification; they rather manifest the complex conditions of a present that is characterized by fragmentation and splintering 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 2018, she received the Erwin and Gisela von Steiner Foundation Prize for her diploma. Since 2016, Ünlü has published books and music albums, most recently a monographic catalog published by Hammann von Mier Verlag in 2022. She was awarded the Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst of the City of Munich in 2022 as well as the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis in 2023. In 2024, Ünlü held a position as interim professorship for painting and graphics at Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Recently, she was awarded the Zeitsicht Art Award 2024 and the Villa Romana Price 2026 (including a ten-months residency at Villa Romana in Florence, Italy).

Solo shows and projects: 2025–2026 nostralgia, Haus der Kunst, Munich; 2025 Papiere, Kunstverein Leverkusen; 2025 Ultra Happy, Villa Stuck, Munich; 2025 Männchen, a grotesque performance by Martin Kindervater & Ensemble, Schwere Reiter, Munich (March 27–29, 2025); 2024 future is the winner, Jahn und Jahn, Munich; 2024 TAF Türkisch-Armenische Freundschaft, Münchner Kammerspiele, Munich; 2024 Carrying the Earth to the Sky, Schillerstrasse 38, Munich; 2024 Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis Bildende Kunst, Galerie der Künstler*innen, Munich; 2024 Eissagungen, Sorry Square, Munich; 2023 New Positions, Art Cologne (with Jahn und Jahn, Munich/Lisbon); 2023 Werke in Fenstern, Fäden der Kunst, Leipzig; 2022 & 2023 poster campaigns in cooperation with Residenztheater, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; 2022 Klassenfragen, Berlinische Galerie, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Berlin; 2022 i nature your believe, Förderpreis bildende Kunst München, Lothringer13, Munich; 2022 Wreck of Medusa, Perlacher Forst, Munich; Kritamon Oracle, easyupstream/Stiftung Federkiel/Kerkisecho, Samos, Greece; etc.