Piotr Uklański: Ottomania

Published on the occasion of Piotr Uklański’s exhibition Ottomania at Luxembourg & Dayan, New York, in 2019, this catalogue revolves around a series of large-scale paintings inspired by the complex Orientalist heritage of Poland, the artist’s country of origin. Uklański’s lushly rendered re-interpretations of a broad range of art historical portraits find the Warsaw-born, New York-based artist, expanding his longstanding engagement with questions of nationalist ideologies, representations of masculinity, and personal identity while redressing contemporary suppression of Eastern Europe’s deep and felicitous connections to the Middle East.

The book includes a critical essay by artist and writer Sam McKinniss, as well as installation views from both Ottomania at Luxembourg & Dayan and Uklański’s parallel presentation at the 16th Istanbul Biennale, The Seventh Continent, for which his work was installed within the permanent collection of the Pera Museum (dedicated to Orientalism in the 19th-century art of Europe and Turkey).