Kennedy Yanko
Kennedy Yanko is a sculptor, painter and installation artist known for working with “paint skins” and salvaged scrap metal. Yanko sources discarded objects and other material from salvage yards before manipulating them, or modifying their form, shape or structure into her own vision. The resulting abstract work, when combined with her paint skins, has often been said to draw upon surrealism and abstract art, as well as referring to physical austerities and her background in performance art.
Originally from St. Louis, Missouri (the artworks by Anselm Kiefer [born 1945] at the Saint Louis Art Museum fascinated her as a child, and she was already making abstracts by age 13), Yanko moved to New York City in her early twenties after leaving San Francisco Art Institute, where she was part way through earning her degree in painting and art history: “I had too much energy for that environment“, Yanko famously told Ted Loos with a laugh (‘Meet the Buzzy Brooklyn Artist Creating Powerful Sculptures out of Found Materials‘, published in Galerie, March 17, 2023), “I can be in the junkyard during the day and in stilettos at night”.
Writing for Interview (‘One Woman’s Trash. Kennedy Yanko’s Sculptures Are a Certain Kind of Woman’, October 6, 2020) Ella Huzenis has described Yanko’s sculptures in the following way:
The sculptures reflect the intense physical nature of the artist’s practice. Upon first moving to New York, Yanko worked as a performer with The Living Theatre, taught yoga on the side, and trained as a bodybuilder in her spare time. Today, sculpture provides Yanko another outlet for her physical energy; her arduous process includes pulling scrap metal by hand from junkyards, bending, cutting, and welding it into various forms. Yanko’s sculptures bear the marks of this labor, imbued with a kind of kinetic energy—the look of things recently in motion, or about to be. Jagged metal pieces twist up from pedestals and along walls. Smooth paint skins wrap around them like supple flesh, or spill forth like sumptuous fabric. Some works even appear vaguely anthropomorphic, as Yanko describes: “sensual” and “femme.”
To this could be added Kennedy Yanko’s own web page (www.kennedyyanko.com) which also points out how:
Yanko deploys her materials in ways that explore the limitations of optic vision, underlining the opportunities we miss when looking with eyes alone. Her methods reflect a dual abstract expressionist-surrealist approach that centers the seen and unseen factors that affect, contribute to, and moderate human experience.
Even though Yanko’s sculptures are sometimes compared to John Chamberlain’s (1927 – 2011) her work is distinctly characterized by her unique way of combining the two materials. Ted Loos, once again, writes:
With her massive found-metal armatures, over which she drapes sensuous, blanketlike paint “skins” made of dried acrylic, Kennedy Yanko jokes that people think she’s the “granddaughter of John Chamberlain and Lynda Benglis.” While reductive, the comparison contains a grain of truth in the way she marries different traditions.
Recent installations include White, Passing at the Rubell Museum (2021, Miami, Florida), where Yanko was an Artist in Residence, By means other than the known senses at the Unlimited Section of Art Basel (2022, Basel, Switzerland), No more Drama at the Brooklyn Museum (2022, Brooklyn, New York), Moving Weight at CFHILL (2022, Stockholm), Tilted Lift at the Museum of Contemporary Art (2023, Detroit) and Soul Talk Salon 94, Miami Art Week (2023, Miami Florida). When these words are being written an exhibition at Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum is in the works too.
