Kennedy Yanko: Humming on Life

Opening reception: Saturday, March 4, 6-8PM

By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the weight of gravity, Kennedy Yanko wields materiality and abstraction with the possibility of intervening in the viewers’ perceptions. In Humming on Life, Yanko‘s first exhibition at Jeffrey Deitch, the artist continues this exploration.

Although the tactile quality and lyrical processuality of Yanko’s works emphasize their sculptural quality, the artist considers herself foremost a painter. In her new body of work, Yanko takes an approach to sculpture that reconnects it, and her, with painting. In recent years, the weathered paint and bruised patinas found on salvaged metal relics informed her palette for the paint skins. Now, the artist is introducing colors to the metal she finds. By painting the metal directly, underpainting, fire-cutting forms and compositions, and then crushing those new shapes, Yanko is expanding the definition of painting through her process. She remarks:

Working this way has been labor-intensive and has exposed me to sounds, like water thrashing inside a metal tank while cleaning it. Feeling that thrashing—hearing a power that felt like infinity incarnate—encouraged me to probe water as a medium and examine my intuitive method more closely, which seemingly only comes from physical exchange: input and output, expansion and contraction. In pulling water apart and becoming more curious about its behavior and participation, I’ve enjoyed revisiting the ways in which it’s a web of activation, a source, and information. It’s a cue and a salve and carries with it tinges of what it’s gone through.

What water did for me in that moment was to point back to the livingness of my medium — of the metal and paint skin I rely on — and wash away the binary between life and matter. Erasing this divide expands the possibility of experience; it gives materiality an abstract power that we yield to. It’s that vitality, found in color, form, attention and consciousness, that I hope this work can be a language for.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Yanko’s work has been exhibited internationally and shown by institutions including the Brooklyn Museum and the Rubell Museum, where she was the 2021 Artist in Residence. Recent institutional showings and installations of Yanko’s work include By Means Other Than the Known Senses, Art Basel Unlimited, Basel (2022), Set It Off, curated by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont, The Parrish Museum, Water Mill (2022), Brooklyn Abstraction: Four Artists, Four Walls, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn (2022). In February 2023, Yanko will have work on view at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft in Louisville, Kentucky.

The illuminating sound element is composed by Samuel Kareem.

Image: Kennedy Yanko, Pink and green music (2023). Photo by Martin Parsekian.

For all press inquiries please contact Jessie Cohen, 415-623-0150, Jessie@jessieiscohen.com