A Quiet Return After a Quarter-Century Hiatus: Gülsün Karamustafa and “Painting Exhibition” at BüroSarıgedik
Across an artistic practice spanning over five decades, Gülsün Karamustafa has navigated every iteration of material—from installation and video to fabric layers gathered at the Spice Bazaar, readymades, and arabesque cinema. Following monumental works held in the collections of international institutions like Tate Modern and the Guggenheim, canvases filtered through her days of imprisonment in 1971, and visual archives documenting Turkey’s social transformation, the title she has chosen for her latest project is strikingly understated: “Painting Exhibition”. Two words, entirely unadorned.
Close Contact with Canvas After a 25-Year Absence
Since her debut solo exhibition at Taksim Art Gallery in 1978, painting has consistently anchored the intellectual spine of Karamustafa’s oeuvre. Yet, as the scale of her discourse expanded, other mediums—installation, assemblage, and video—moved to the fore. Having not held a standalone painting exhibition for nearly a quarter of a century, the artist closes that gap with this new presentation at BüroSarıgedik, running from September 17 to October 28, 2026.
The exhibition brings together acrylic paintings on canvas, drawings, and mixed-media works on paper. Subtitled Promised Paintings, the acrylic canvases adopt a remarkably modest scale of 20 x 30 cm. Yet this intimate sizing denotes not a reduction, but rather an invitation to a concentrated, close-range dialogue constructed with quiet patience. The subtitle also directly echoes A Promised Exhibition, her 2013 survey at SALT, bringing a long-deferred expectation to fruition at last.
A Chronograph Recording Time
Karamustafa defines herself as a “chronograph”—an instrument that registers, measures, and marks the passage of time. Born in Ankara in 1946, the artist was shaped by the social impetus of the 1968 generation following her studies at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. Imprisoned on political grounds in 1971 and stripped of her passport for 16 years, she experienced firsthand the realities of borders and forced immobility. This testimony, initiated with her Prison Paintings (1972) series produced during her incarceration, evolved over subsequent decades into a layered archive documenting Turkey’s modernization narrative—incorporating satin quilts (Mystic Transport, 1992), urban waste, and news clippings.
“The material usually guides me,” notes the artist, for whom both the readymade object and the canvas surface serve as equal vessels of social memory. After representing Turkey at the Venice Biennale in 2024 with her installation Hollow and Broken: State of the World, her turn back to small-scale canvases in Beyoğlu as she approaches eighty manifests a deliberate stance. Coming in the wake of monumental global stages, this soft-spoken gesture evokes a serene, introspective dialogue with her own roots.
A Representation Office, Not a Gallery
Hosting the exhibition, BüroSarıgedik positions itself not as a conventional commercial gallery, but as an “artist representation office.” Working with a carefully curated roster of distinct voices—including Cengiz Çekil, Erdil Yaşaroğlu, Erdem Taşdelen, Meriç Algün, Leyla Pekmen, Aslı Özdoyuran, and Dilek Winchester—the institution’s restrained ethos aligns seamlessly with the unpretentious title Karamustafa has assigned to her show, Painting Exhibition.
Retreating from grand narratives into modest surfaces, this gathering serves as a poignant reminder that painting is far more than a static image; it remains a site of memory through which time, borders, and suppressed words are distilled.
