Istanbul-based Ali Gulec is a graphic artist with a difference. His surreal illustrations are like identikit drawings aiming to prosecute the material arts. Working on the margins of what is possible with his medium, Gulec's forms, figures, and situations are remarkable for their clarity and strength of purpose, and maintain an iconographic intensity that would make any rock band bereft of an album cover salivate with admiration.

If you are interested, the Korean call this style Trot (ppongjjak); a very simple life story is told with three guitar chords – quite a typical situation for our planet. Long-legged dolls from LPG (by the way, “Lovely Pretty Girls” could be “Long Pretty Girls”) are certainly smiling, though it would have been more logical for them to cry their hearts out, but that's what the Korean are like; who has seen doramas, will understand.

Visitors look up at mock-ups of dinosaur skeletons inside the Museum of Natural History in Pyongyang on September 28, 2016. (Photo by Ed Jones/AFP Photo)

Nigerian make-up artist, Mary Oni, creates artwork on her chest using make-up, in her home in Lagos, Nigeria on January 26, 2022. (Photo by Seun Sanni/Reuters)

The moon rises over people gathered on Glastonbury Tor ahead of tomorrow's Blue Moon on July 30, 2015 in Somerset, England. The full moon appearing on July 31 will be what's called a Blue Moon, which refers to the second of two full moons appearing in the same calendar month. The last time this happened was in 2012 and there isn't due another until 2018. (Photo by Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

This huge male orangutan is having a right old laugh as he squints his eyes and shows his huge teeth. The orangutan, called Bimbo, was relaxing on a platform around 5m high in his enclosure when he broke out into a laugh. But his happy smile soon disappeared when another orangutan came over to see what was going on. Bimbo – the only male in the group of five apes at Leipzig Zoo, in Germany - appears to be laughing in much the same way as a human would. (Photo by Martina Radtke/Solent News)

Sasha Muir and Margaret Davidson sit in a car as some of the 30 barbary macaques, known as the Middle Hill Troop after living between the top of Gibraltar rock and the town, show what happens when motorists forget to lock their luggage compartments, as Scotland’s only monkey drive-through section opens at Blair Drummond safari park in Stirling, Scotland on October 8, 2015. (Photo by Andrew Milligan/PA Wire)

A Flemish demonstrator, one of thousands who gathered for a march through Brussels to protest against what the Flemings call their subjucation by the French-speaking Walloons, draws back as he is jeered by a crowd of Walloons on the pavement in a Brussels Street, on October 14, 1962. The Flemish demonstrators clashed with Walloon counter demonstrators as riot police sought to maintain order. The Flemings claim that although they form 60% of the population in Belgium, they are inadequately represented in the government, and they say, the Walloons get most of the top jobs in the armed forces and the diplomatic service. (Photo by AP Photo)