Pretend it's true. Gülbin Ünlü's art as an extension of reality

With her constellations of colours, shapes and figures, Gülbin Ünlü opens up a field of associations with the seemingly familiar. This makes her pictures approachable and enables viewers to initiate a game with their own experiences and expectations. Like the works she has been creating for around five years, the current works also have a complex development process behind them. It begins with a sifting through the possible visual working material that the artist has collected and is surrounded by in her studio: family photos, magazine and other media images, the results of research - a personal and internal "archive" in which the experiences, impressions and views of a 21st century woman with a post-migrant biography are sedimented. Image elements from a wide variety of origins are then selected, combined in the computer to create an initial composition and edited. "[Only] imitation is true innovation," says Ünlü about her approach, meaning that new images can only be created from other, already existing and seen images. This also happens when the artist recently brings artificial intelligence into play as a sparring partner that helps shape the draft image, the digital sketch for the respective final image. Ünlü describes this process as a ping-pong, a back and forth of editing suggestions, primarily under stylistic or art-historical criteria, a kind of selection from a public image archive (which is what the AI ultimately is) and this also as a logical continuation of her previous work with the personal card box or the family photo album. By including the AI, the artist poses the question of authorship more consciously than ever before, putting its dissolution or reorganisation up for discussion more clearly than before.

Only after a long design process does the realisation of the haptic-physical, actual work of art begin, which can materialise on a wide variety of image carriers and in all possible formats - as a picture on the wall, as a performance or video, sometimes also as a sound piece, as a three-dimensional object or in a larger, installative context. Gülbin Ünlü has developed a hybrid technique for her pictures that combines both painting and printing. For the artist, this special technique functions as a kind of "leveller", as she herself describes it. It enables her to eliminate the differences between the original image sources (drawing, painting, photography, print, analogue and digital) and thus aesthetically amalgamate content, contrasts or contradictions that are often considered incompatible. Ünlü came up with her technique while searching for a way around the "stroke", the traditional, (mostly) male-connoted gesture in painting that stands for the "disegno" of an artist-author controlling all processes of image production. Ünlü's technique is also fundamentally conceptual, but also leaves the creation of the picture to chance at certain points. And she likes to transgress artistic "no-go areas" on the way to the manifestation of the artwork, for example when panne velvet, lace and other decorative fabrics are used as picture supports, when glitter effects are used or transparent fabrics make the underlying stretcher frame visible - and thus also painting as a construction.

Gülbin Ünlü's art is to be understood on all levels as a continuation of her own existence. "For me, it's about the REALisation of an idea," says the artist. "It's about making something tangible out of what surrounds me and what I am in it, how I take it in and witness it, in other words, about turning this abstract structure and feeling into something tangible. I'm not interested in production, but in following my longing for transcendence, in creating a new reality with art."

Bernhart Schwenk

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. She was awarded the Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst of the City of Munich in 2022 as well as the Bayerischer Kunstförderpreis in 2023. In October 2023 Jahn und Jahn presented Gülbin Ünlü in the section New Positions at Art Cologne. In April 2024 Gülbin Ünlü takes on a substitute professorship for painting and graphics at Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.