For someone who has ricocheted from one medium to another long before it was fashionable — installations, photography, collages, performances, films — the Polish artist Piotr Uklanski sure has a lot of different kinds of paintbrushes in his Greenpoint, Brooklyn, studio.

Ranging from a wide wallpaper brush to tiny-bristled detailers, they seemed to signal that for his new series, “Ottomania,” he is taking the most traditional art form quite seriously. His new paintings remake, with much creative leeway, Orientalist pictures from the past.

But lest he seem too serious, he got to the heart of the matter right away. The big question was, “How much of a wink to include?” For starters, most of his “Ottomania” works are painted on velvet, a background better known for pictures of Elvis found on motel walls.

Mr. Uklanski, 50, has been something of an art world bad boy, bringing a dark-humored, ironic touch to varied projects, including a Polish spaghetti western film he wrote and directed in 2006, “Summer Love,” that starred Val Kilmer as a slumped-over corpse. Before that, in 2003, there was his two-page photograph in Artforum featuring the bare derrière of his girlfriend (and now wife) Alison Gingeras. A former curator at Centre Pompidou, Ms. Gingeras wrote that the image tried to “confront the projection of taboo.”