ArtMeant* Project

In recent years, the accomplished artist Ülkü Yılmaz has frequently made a name for herself through her solo exhibitions and continues her artistic practice between Istanbul and Paris.

Yılmaz’s works encourage the viewer to engage in a dialogue across time. Her poetic expression is often adorned with grotesque elements, and black is her signature color. She can be interpreted as a modern vanitas painter, which encapsulates her profound connection with European art.

The artist seamlessly integrates different periods, blending the traditional and the contemporary in her distinctive style. While she does not turn away from the present, she continues to draw inspiration from tradition. This, in my opinion, is one of the fundamental aspects that make Yılmaz’s paintings truly unique.

By utilizing these diverse sources, the artist ensures the thematic integrity of her paintings. Through these channels, she conveys emotions from her own world to us. In doing so, we reach the essence of what she intends to express. This holistic, inclusive, and objective journey ultimately leads us to a deeply personal and subjective destination. For the viewer, this layered experience is both enlightening and profoundly relatable.

Her art is a visual dialogue only with herself in a fairy tale taking place in the abyss. She sees everything with her heart rejecting logic and rational dialectic in her one person utopian world which she leaves everyone else behind.

As ArtMeant Project, we highly value hearing artists speak about their own works and sharing these insights with you. When an artwork is described by the artist, it gains a new existence—one that is the most authentic and genuine.

The piece that Ülkü Yılmaz has shared with us ;

“ Since the beginning of my story in art, I have been depicting myself with self portraits by turning my back to the viewer or looking at their eyes directly or closing my eyes but in the beginning of 2025, with this painting, I turned my eyes and soul to my own black heart that is a meditative retreat that takes me to dive into my very own self by isolating myself from the reality of your world… It is not an escape, but a return to the only place where I truly exist-within myself with the help of the most elegant color ever known which is black … It is the only color that speaks to my too quite and sensitive feelings that are really very difficult to survive in this time … 

Even if Scientifically, the black is not a color and means the absence of light, for me it’s a color that has the light of my heart in a world that even light has a meaning only in relation to darkness of black“

-Ülkü Yılmaz-

To reach the artist’s website; https://ulkuyilmaz.com/works