Gülsün Karamustafa

Gülsün Karamustafa was born in Ankara, Turkey, in 1946 and works between Istanbul and Berlin. She paints and draws, and also makes installations, assemblages, ready-mades, photographs and videos. Several installations use textiles such as quilts and children's uniforms.

In the gallery's account, her subjects are migration, displacement, memory, gender and the modernisation of Türkiye, and she calls herself a "chronographer" of the country's modern history. The Prison Paintings, made from 1972 to 1978, include Körebe, 1974. Mystic Transport, 1992, sets handmade satin quilts inside metal buckets on wheels. The Promised Paintings series, including Promised Paintings 3 from 2019, draws on Byzantine imagery.

She studied painting from 1964 to 1969 in Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu's studio within the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts. Imprisoned after the 1971 military coup, she was barred from travelling abroad until 1987. Solo exhibitions include A Promised Exhibition at SALT, Istanbul, in 2013, Chronographia at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, in 2016, and After the Cosmopolis at Lunds konsthall in 2022. At the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 she was the artist chosen for the Pavilion of Türkiye. She received the Prince Claus Award in 2014 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2021, and Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum hold her work.