Retro Future

 rETRO fUTURE

2025 solo exhibition at Salon 94

“Steeped in techniques and materials that are resolutely contemporary, Yanko’s art has precedents and sources, both ancient and modern. In Talisman (2024), an almost six-foot-high relief that hugs the wall, a painted skin casually rests on an abandoned vertical metal door. Appearing in dynamic motion, it is inspired in part by the Hellenistic Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 BCE), a source of great inspiration for the artist since an encounter in the Louvre, yet might also appear like a discarded Color Field painting-rolled up, tossed, consigned to yesterday…

In works like Cy’s Vision (2024),Yanko introduces patterning and color onto her painted skins, which wind around metal frames, swallowing their rigidity with softness. In Paludamentum (2024) a painted skin lists amorously to one side and nestles into the salvaged red steel ground that welcomes and expels its softer counterpart. The title (referencing the mantle secured on a male official’s shoulder) is a further response to Yanko’s fascination with the garments depicted in sculptures such as Winged Victory.

The works on show expand on Yanko’s explorations into materiality, compelling the viewer to ask: ‘Have we seen this object before? Is it futuristic or planetary? Linked to cyberspace or technology?Is it so analog that it has recognizable roots in the past

— Excerpt from Retro Future press release. Read more about the show here.

Step into Kennedy Yanko’s current studio, a former industrial sign shop. She’s there but only half visible in a dramatic pas de deux of sculpture making, a demonstration of intense corporeality. Yanko’s head and upper body are temporarily concealed beneath what appears to be a vibrant draped cape, enhancing the artist’s superpower where her magic is unfettered. When she finally moves out from under that cloak of creativity—she describes the mutable material as a “skin” of colorful poured paint—she has deliberately wrestled with, then attached, the free-flowing organic expanse onto a wreck of jagged industrial scrap. Yanko’s art lives and breathes in tense contrasts: the flowing materiality of hardened paint heaved onto, across, or around junkyard castoffs. It is the edge of existence where, once she emerges from the interiority of placement, rendering, and inventive scrutiny, Yanko steadies her footing and the choreography of her work is complete. Steeped in techniques and materials that are resolutely contemporary, Yanko’s art has the burning urgency of the new but with precedents both ancient and modern.

Even the title of her exhibition at Salon 94, Retro Future, alerts viewers to an awareness of the sources that have made an impact on her current objects. At thirty-six, Yanko is a diligent student of the past with unexpected fields occupying her vision: among the influences are ancient Greek and Roman statuary of figures wearing voluminous drapery, and metal sculptures by American artists from the 1940s and ’50s. She recently described their significance to her practice: “My color washes, monochrome paint skins, found metal skeletons and shadow perspectives respectively call upon abstract expressionism, color field painting, a post-minimalist sensibility and the light and space vernacular; they all coexist as a whole, unsequenced.”

— Excerpt from Brooke Kamin Rapaport’s Essay, On The Edge of Existence: Kennedy Yanko’s New Sculpture. Read more here.