Painting Exhibition

Gülsün Karamustafa presents Painting Exhibition, titled Resim Sergisi in Turkish, a solo exhibition at BüroSarıgedik in Beyoğlu, Istanbul. The show opened on the evening of 17 September 2026 and closes on 28 October 2026. It brings together paintings in acrylic on canvas, drawings and works on paper in mixed media by the Turkish artist, who was born in Ankara in 1946.

The gallery frames the exhibition as a line running from her first public showing of paintings, a 1978 solo exhibition at Taksim Sanat Galerisi in Istanbul, to the present. By the gallery's account, it is the first time in close to twenty-five years that she has shown paintings on their own. The image chosen to introduce the show depicts a standing woman in a blue robe edged with gold and red. A framed, inverted head sits at her waist, and spiky green leaves rise from a black ground. In words used as the show's epigraph, the artist states: "I never gave up painting", adding that it gave her a "fundamental freedom".

No curator is named. Karamustafa describes herself as a "chronographer" of modern Türkiye, following the country through its nation-building and modernisation. The gallery places migration, displacement, gender, identity and cultural memory at the centre of a career of more than five decades. Installation, video and textile joined her practice in the late 1980s. Painting never left it, and the gallery calls it "the intellectual backbone" of her work.

In 2024 she made Hollow and Broken: A State of the World for the Pavilion of Türkiye, part of the 60th Venice Biennale. Its curator, Esra Sarıgedik Öktem, had founded BüroSarıgedik in 2017. Karamustafa won the Prince Claus Award in 2014 and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize in 2021. Museum collections with her work include the Centre Pompidou, mumok, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Tate Modern. Another solo exhibition, Remains of a Forgotten Promise, runs at Ab-Anbar in London from 8 October to 12 December 2026.