Artist: Nazim Ünal Yilmaz
Exhibition title: Brushman
Venue: Harkawik, New York, US
Date: June 23 – July 23, 2023
Photography: all images are copyrighted. Courtesy of the artist and Harkawik, New York
Harkawik is pleased to announce Brushman, the debut New York solo exhibition of Trabzon-born, Vienna-based painter Nazim Ünal Yilmaz. Brushman is an episodic circuit; a series of modest-scale canvases installed in a ring around the gallery, in which lifelong fixations of the artist recur, recede, transform and dominate pictures that might otherwise be described as pleasurable, light. Central to Yilmaz’s investigations is the notion of the artist as an unwilling bride; the meeting and undoing of the political ideologies of nations; sublimation, or the transformation of libidinal energy into socially acceptable activities; phallocentrism and the hubris of men; life’s cycles, time-markers, moments of schadenfreude and sisyphean activities; the many stories that we tell ourselves, chiefly those codified in cartoons, symbols and slogans. Yilmaz is a wry humorist and a careful student and teacher of art history. His relationship to the canon might be summed up in the oft-quoted remark by Giles Deleuze that his strategy is “a kind of ass-fuck, an immaculate conception [in which I am] approaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would nonetheless be monstrous.” Yilmaz offers the monstrous child of Picabia, of Picasso, of Matisse. He is the exhibition’s “Brushman,” a tortured antihero who consumes and deflates modernist fallacies in equal measure. In Baby Me, his body shrunk to the scale of his brush, the painter adorns himself with a hero’s mask, which trails off casually in a swoosh of paint. Turtel Kickers is a take on Osman Hamdi Bey’s 1906 painting “The Tortoise Trainer;” here, soldiers kick the gentle creatures indifferently. In First Couple and You So Strong, Tom? , American cartoon characters are stuck in what might be a Jean Nouvel building or a Supermax prison, their expressions frozen in blissful diffidence. Some of the exhibition’s most poignant works are it simplest, most direct; in Old Furniture, a figure sits in a yogic pose, nude except for socks and loafers, sandwiched between two antique armchairs that are forcing his shoes into his eyes. Yilmaz’s exhibition is a testament to the exquisite pleasures of painting, the horrors of jingoism, and the tormented but vital existence of the artist.
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2023, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Under the Staircase, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Mondrian for Everyone, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Painter in Hamam, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Time Running Out, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, You So Strong Tom?, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, 123123412345, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Me and the Europeans, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Old Furniture, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, He Is Fine, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Brushman, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Canvas, 2021, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, First Couple, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Rafaello and Marx, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Unknown Workers, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Turtel Kickers, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Toiletpapier, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, No More Ice Cream, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Baby Me, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Horses, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Steeplechase, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Innertime, 2018, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Nite Smoking, 2018, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Snowmen Climbing Mountain, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Futureuristic Kick, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Pink Hell, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Papers, 2023, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
Nazim Ünal Yilmaz, Martyrs, 2022, Oil on canvas, 19⅝”h x 15⅝”w (50 x 40cm)
