Max Wigram Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition by London-based artist Mustafa Hulusi.

Notorious for his viral fly-posting campaigns in London’s East End bearing the repeated emblem of his own name, Mustafa Hulusi moves from urban interventionism into the realm of exquisite misquoted promotional material representing nothing but flowers, fruit, and the delicate child-skin of a young girl’s outreaching hand.

For The End of The West, the artist has conceived a body of works comprised of screen-prints on metal, photos and paintings. Everything in these works is loaded and heavy. Realised in the style of a Maoist painter hiding away from the propaganda demands of the committee, Hulusi’s paintings are unadulterated visions of impossible innocence provoking a disturbing and ecstatic experience of pure pleasure. Hyperrealist paradises, full of blue skies, verdant gardens, undying blooms, and the prepubescent promise of youth, Hulusi’s practice bursts onto the concrete brick face of Twenty-First Century London, showering fragments of uncompromising, hard luminous joy into the grey grease-smeared streets.

The objective, unsentimental purification of the visual sign of happiness and fulfilment in its propagandist precision of execution reappears in Apple Hand (2005), a free-standing sculpture mounted on anodised aluminium. It mobilises the image of a hand reaching out for a fresh apple, which sits between a suspended moment and absorption, appearing to be exactly balanced. The gesture is repeated throughout the exhibition until it steps toward aesthetic abandonment, simultaneously commanded by bliss and despair. Being a Turkish Cypriot born and educated in the UK, Hulusi largely involves his country of origin as a source material for his images. Its landscape of flowers and olive trees – traditional symbols of peace – for the artist suggests an ideal of the beautiful not merely as some idle withdrawal into private comforts, but a public challenge to a culture that has given up on optimistic expressions of affirmation and change.

Born in 1971 in London (UK), since 2002 Hulusi has taken part in group exhibitions in the UK and internationally including East International 05, Norwich Art Gallery, Norwich; This is England, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; Leaps of Faith, an international arts project for the city of Nicosia, Cyprus; The Ten Commandments, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany. Forthcoming exhibitions include a project for Rachmaninoff’s, London.