Nazım Ünal Yılmaz

Nazım Ünal Yılmaz’s (b. 1981) painting is a sensible balance between dealing with matters of the private and the public by merging personal story with social history. Their combination of poetics with politics as well as their ability to renew the language of expressive figurative painting gives his pieces strength and individuality.

Although dealing with issues like identity and nationality as well as personal freedom, due to his formal choices, the paintings are not didactic, polemic or pedagogic, but on the contrary they invite the spectator to actively participate in the decoding of the painting. His brushstrokes look as if they are blown across quickly, but they are placed exactly right. He gives the surface an almost irreverence, while at the same time obviously paying great attention to what he brings to the canvas. Even tastelessness, the deliberately dilettantism, unpleasant colors, blurriness are always clearly intentional. This contradictoriness between skill and working against it creates in his way of painting the tension.

Instead of coherent images, the spectator of Nazım Ünal Yılmaz´s work is presented with a pluralistic and heterogeneous universe, in which they must draw relations between its various formal and conceptual elements. In broad terms, the works exemplify a desire on the part of a new generation of artists to engage painting once again and to deploy this highly personalized mode of expression in the service of a temperament that balances the political and the idiosyncratic.

Nazım Ünal Yılmaz’s work has been exhibited in Exil, Vienna, 2020; PSM Galerie, Berlin,2018; Gallery Sanatorium, Istanbul, 2017; Funktion Room, London 2015; Pilevneli Project, Istanbul 2012; Ve.Sch, Vienna, 2011; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, 2008; Galerie Kunstbüro, Vienna, 2007, as well as participated in group exhibitions in Magenta Plain, New York, 2021; Tallinn Art Hall, 2020; Crone Berlin, 2019; Carbon12, Dubai; Kunstraum D21 Leipzig, 2018; Arp Museum, Remagen, 2015; Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2012; Gallery C24, New York; Depo Istanbul; Das Weisse Haus, Wien, 2011; Kunsthaus Stade, 2010; Ernst Barlach Museum, Hamburg, 2009; Ausstellungshalle, Frankfurt, 2008; Kunstforum BACA, Vienna, Kunsthalle Krems, 2007; Kunsthaus Merano, 2006; Borusan, Istanbul, 2005 among others. His work has been recently acquired by the Belvedere Museum.