New Works: Mustafa Hulusi

Galerist is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Mustafa Hulusi.

Including painting and wall paintings, Hulusi’s diverse practice centres around the mining of what could be termed as a collective unconscious. Quoting and re-presenting aspects of the known and familiar via different conventions, stereotypes and genres – popular culture, advertising, kitsch, photorealism - he examines our fascination with images and their potential as “devices to take you out of this world”. His overtly mediated depictions of the real confront the viewer with coded parameters. Paradoxically, in their exaggeration they also remind us to look at the possibility of empathy and to allow subjective readings and resonances to come into play.

The Exstasy Almond Blossom (Quad) series perfectly epitomises these productive contradictions inherent in Hulusi’s work. In quadrouple grids, social realist style blossom images alternate with decidedly dazzling black and white starburst motifs. Competing for our attention, these two highly manipulated tropes of appropriated ‘beauty’ hold us in their thrall despite their ersatz status, acting, in Hulusi’s words, as “secular icons of escapism”.

Copied, cloned, zoomed and stretched like all his imagery for maximum aesthetic effect, Hulusi’s recurring use of abstraction is appropriated from a variety of sources, including Op art, advertising, computer graphics and Islamic design. In the Abstract Rose series, the flower paintings are again coupled with various abstract designs. Using more fluid shapes compared to the starburst designs, these abstractions lend the diptychs a different mood compared to the quads, but are no less knowing in their tactics.

About the Artist:

Mustafa Hulusi lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Afyon at Max Wigram Gallery, London and Obliteration and Memory at Patrick Painter, Los Angeles (2009). His work can be found in public and private collections internationally, including the Francois Pinault Collection and Tate Modern Gallery. He will be included in the second part of Newspeak: British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London in October 2010.