The Circular in Her

Kennedy Yanko’s sculptures are remarkable amalgamations of metal and rubber intertwined, the two materials challenging one another, often poetically installed on the walls or hanging from the ceiling. Yanko dates the creation of her, so called, paint skins to one her first shows (Wu-Wie, Abstrakt Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri) back in 2009:

I was pouring on canvases and I was getting the paint to do some really interesting things just in the way that it would interact with itself. It was when that show opened that I realized that I wanted to take paint off the canvas. I started making paint skins a year later. I was pouring paint and making skins by themselves, hanging them from the ceiling and the wall making installations with them. And then I started working with rubber and the paint, and I had a whole new process after that.

To create her paint skins, Yanko pours large amounts of paint and lets it dry into a tarp-like material. From there, she sculpts the paint skin, using her whole body to manipulate the heavy sheet of paint. The paint skin thus becomes a structural material not dissimilar from the metal she utilizes in her sculptures. At times, the two materials are indistinguishable. Having discovered the opportunities and possibilities offered by paint skins Yanko took another vital step a few years later when she decided to learn how to weld, cut and shape metal. In ‘Kennedy Yanko Isn’t Afraid to Take Up Space’ (article by Ryan Waddoups, published in Surface, October 20, 2020) she gives the following background:

In 2016, I became tired of my work and wanted to do something different, so I apprenticed in an iron-working factory near my studio in Bushwick. I was first taught to work with sheet metal – welding, cutting, and bending. My interest in metal’s potential has only grown. Metal offers something I’ve been looking for since 2009, when I first started pushing the canvas. I wanted to open it up, so I started by lifting paint skins and installing them on their own. As soon as I removed paint from the canvas, a subconscious search for a skeletal system began. I started throwing paint on rubber and extending the paint by moving my body beneath the rubber, which brought a new viscosity to the paint. I worked like that for seven years, reworking the rubber works like my early abstract canvas paintings, and entered a new dialogue for myself with three dimensionality. I’m still getting to know metal, but it’s shown itself to be the backbone I was seeking. I’m excited by how much there is to discover.

Provenance
CFHILL, Stockholm.
Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Exhibitions
CFHILL, Stockholm, Kennedy Yanko -Moving Weight, 29 April – 20 May 2022.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation