Artist: Gülsün Karamustafa

Ab-Anbar Gallery presents the first and most comprehensive solo exhibition of Gülsün Karamustafa’s practice in the United Kingdom. Spanning four decades of work across painting, textile, video, installation and mixed media, the exhibition brings together early paintings from the 1970s through to the present day, with Karamustafa’s monumental commission for the Turkish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2024 at its centre. The works are not arranged chronologically. Instead, the exhibition unfolds as a temporal maze, tracing the deep formal and conceptual threads that run continuously through an oeuvre built in the shadow of coups, political ruptures and the unrelenting pressures of capitalist modernity.

Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946, Ankara, Turkey) is an artist who lives and works in Istanbul, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Karamustafa has an extensive oeuvre distinguished by installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos that interweave political narratives with personal histories. Her work addresses questions of migration, displacement, military dictatorship, identity, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism.

Karamustafa has participated in numerous international biennials including Venice, IT; Istanbul,TR; São Paulo, BR; Gwangju, KR; Kyiv, UA; Singapore, SG Havana, CU; Thessaloniki, GR; Sevilla, ES. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at major institutions and galleries worldwide, including SALT Beyoğlu and Galata, TR; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin DE; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; IVAM Institut d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES; The National Contemporary Museum of Athens, GR; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, DE; Lunds Konsthall, Lunds, SE; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg [AT], Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, DE; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, DE among others. Her works have been included in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; MUMOK, Vienna; Wien Museum, Vienna; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nürnberg; EMST National Contemporary Art Museum, Athens; Istanbul Modern Art Museum and Arter, Istanbul.