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. — Kennedy Yanko
Kennedy Yanko’s practice occupies the shifting territory between painting and sculpture, where salvaged metal and poured paint are transformed into forms that appear at once materially grounded and remarkably weightless. Although her works may initially situate her within the realm of sculpture, Yanko approaches her practice through the sensibility of a painter. Her manipulated metal assumes the gestural quality of a brushstroke: bending, folding, dripping down walls or projecting into space with an apparent lack of weight. Across these industrial remnants, she drapes her signature paint-skins : expansive membranes of acrylic paint poured onto a flat surface and lifted, once nearly dry, into supple, autonomous forms. Suspended over and threaded through the crevices of their metallic supports, these skins retain the immediacy of a painterly gesture while acquiring a sculptural presence of their own.
Yanko’s work is defined by the tension between the fluid and the resistant, the organic and the industrial, the intuitive and the deliberately constructed. Her paint- skins gather and unfold like fabric, their surfaces shifting between translucency, saturated colour and sculptural density. Scarlet, tangerine and magenta coexist with lavender, mint and moss green, recalling the varied patinas of the metals beneath them. The resulting compositions seem to hover between expansion and collapse, their forms suggesting movement, breath or the suspended instant of a body in motion.