Gülbin Ünlü

Munich-based artist Gülbin Ünlü is the winner of the Augsburg "Zeitsicht Art Award 2024". This will be presented to her at the opening of her solo exhibition "really?" at the Centre for Contemporary Art. She will be showing works from her current production, some of which are new and were created especially for the exhibition. Ünlü's artistic practice rejects both representationalism and aesthetic self-assurance. Her works are created between media: painting, photography, video, sound, digital print, language and space. In this way, she realises pictorial bodies that are composed of fragments and generated from breaks, repetitions, surface shifts, so-called mash-ups. This often involves a moment of disruption - visually and structurally - but never as a mere effect.

Even the exhibition title "really?" functions less as a theme than as a semantic disruptive impulse: a single word whose meaning shifts depending on the tone of voice - approving, sarcastic, exhausted or angry. This ambiguity is central to Ünlü's artistic thinking, which explores shifts in context and surplus meaning. Her works appear situational, never loud, sometimes political, but without being programmatic. What appears decorative can be a trace or a break. Concepts such as origin, normality or representation do not appear as motifs, but as structural forces - visible, for example, in folds, symmetries or empty spaces. "really?" thus becomes a point of interference between work and context - open to ambivalence, irony, mistrust and a brief smile of doubt.

Gülbin Ünlü studied painting, drawing, sculpture and performance at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Munich. In 2024, she was interim head of the painting and graphics class there - formerly under the professorship of Markus Oehlen. For her multifaceted work, the Turkish-German artist was honoured with the City of Munich Sponsorship Award in 2022 and the Kunstfonds Foundation Scholarship and the Bavarian Art Sponsorship Award in 2023. Her works were shown at venues including the Pinakothek der Moderne (Pinacotheca of the Modern) in Munich in 2020, the Berlinische Galerie in 2022 and the Villa Stuck and Haus der Kunst (House of art) in Munich in 2025.

Last edited on 06.06.2026