Announcing Representation
James Cohan is delighted to announce the representation of Kennedy Yanko in collaboration with Salon 94.
Click here for the full press release.
“Waking up to you,” 2024. Art Basel Switzerland with James Cohan Gallery.
Working with paint skins and found metal, Kennedy Yanko constructs sublime sculptures and architecturally scaled installations that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, Yanko’s works cast off the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, surreal and earthbound.
Central to Yanko’s practice is her work with paint skins – a material created by pouring many gallons of paint onto a flat surface that is lifted and shaped into a tarp-like entity once it’s nearly dry. Yanko positions these abstracted painterly gestures within the meticulously crafted metal armatures she has sourced, welded, torched, and bent. The process of marrying paint with metal is laborious, requiring both power and innovation to twist and mold the skins onto their dynamic salvaged supports.
Despite the conspicuous solidity of Yanko’s materials, her sculptures and installations often appear weightless – as if they were on the verge of taking flight or drawing breath. By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the logic of gravity and form, Yanko works to expand and challenge the limits of her viewers' perception.
Looking Back
“Soul Talk” with Salon 94
Installation during Miami Art Week 2023 with Salon 94 at the Stardust Pavilion in the Miami Design District: 95 NE 40th St. Click here for the full press release.
Salon 94, in collaboration with the Miami Design District and the architectural collective Flare, presents Soul Talk, Yanko’s new monumental sculpture displayed in a glass and steel pavilion designed by Alessandra Cianchetta and Veruska Vasconez.
The 10-foot-long sculpture is made up of the final piece of a shipping container Yanko broke apart and used in No More Drama, her installation spanning 70 feet at The Brooklyn Museum (on view until July 2024). Here, Soul Talk is a reclining sculpture in full view, day and night, in a room of her own.
humming on life
I sat down with my dear friend and fellow artist, Alteronce Gumby, to reflect on the making of ‘Humming on Life’, my solo exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in Spring 2023
Subscribe to my quarterly newsletter: