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.
Yanko’s vertically reaching, architecturally scaled sculpture, By means other than the known senses, the artist’s largest work to date, is a tornado of cascading metal forms. It is created from a monumental shipping container that Yanko crushed, reformed, and selectively covered in paint. The final sculpture looks so alive, it almost seems like it’s breathing.
Suspended from the ceiling, this monumental form gives an impression of weightlessness, an effect that is only intensified by the ribbons of paint skin – sheaths of latex paint – that hug the curves of Yanko’s behemoth much like streamers of silk or another luxurious, sensuous fabric. Expanding on the work Yanko executed while at the Rubell Residency (Miami, FL, Spring 2021) — three tornado-like metal forms built from a single shipping container — this organic composition is an abstract expression of intuition; of the indescribable feeling linked to a gut reaction. For Yanko, sculpture is a phenomenological method, and this work is an impulse.