Throughout her career, fast-rising artist Kennedy Yanko has explored the boundless potential of abstraction across media and surfaces. Engaging with both physical and sensual abstraction, she plays with particles and teases out their expressive and alchemical possibilities. Her ascent accelerated during the pandemic, catalyzed by her unforgettable presentation at the Rubell Museum during Art Basel Miami in 2021. That show marked the culmination of her residency and ignited a meteoric rise in value, though her market remained comfortably and stably grounded in genuine primary demand.
The St. Louis-born, Miami-based artist is further cementing her momentum this month with a double exhibition across two dealers: Salon 94 and James Cohan. While the Cohan show marks a new chapter following the gallery’s announcement of her representation and a solo booth at the last Frieze London, her installation at Salon 94 reads as both a retrospective and a meditation on the evolution of her practice. We recently caught up with the artist to explore what these years-in-the-making shows reveal about her work’s relentless and unbridled transformation—and where it’s headed next.
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Yanko’s artistic language blends the legacy of American abstraction, Arte Povera and the ready-made into hybrid sculptural bodies. In her work, found scrap metal—mechanical relics from heavy vehicles—fuse with sensual layers of paint molded into something akin to veils. “For the last decade, I’ve been developing what I call paint skins—dried layers of paint that I peel and shape into almost tarp-like sheets,” she tells Observer, describing how these sculptural elements are affixed to collage-like compositions made from salvaged metal. Over found metal skeletons, the skins create a painterly textural interplay while revealing a deep-seated inspiration drawn from classical Greek and Roman sculptures’ timeless elegance and idealized forms.
The metal parts, she explains, are selected intuitively but with precision, as each piece becomes a partner in a choreographed embrace with the pliant paint. “It’s a very specific choice but not specific in a way that’s about perfection. It’s more about something that feels right. It’s intuitive,” Yanko says. “It’s not about finding the perfect form—it’s about resonance.” At the scrapyard, she digs through discarded fragments with no fixed agenda. “It’s instinctual, like dating, honestly. You know it when you feel it.”
Yanko’s practice thrives within the dialectic between soft and hard, matter and form, presence and potential. “I rarely begin with a fixed idea,” she explains. “Once I’m inside the work, physically engaging with the skins and the metal, I let the materials guide the form.” For Yanko, the final image is unknowable without the material, just as the material reveals nothing without the image. Form, as intelligible reality, is already latent in the material she chooses—but only in the process does it become the principle that gives matter its shape.
The key lies in this physical, sensual exchange between material and maker. “I’m always responding to what’s in front of me—from the color choices to the emerging compositions,” she says. “There’s a dialogue happening. It’s a dance where the materials are leading.” For her, the process of encounter eclipses the idea of the object. In her hands, matter becomes pure potential—an amorphous substance awaiting form.
Her background in performance, particularly her early involvement with the Living Theatre, along with practices like Qigong, yoga, philosophy, and a studied understanding of psychology, inform her physical awareness of material and gesture. That deep physical engagement with matter and its forces is what allows Kennedy Yanko to translate the fluidity and plasticity of the sensation into the structure—the vis elastica that propels particles toward their destined shape. “Maybe I had an initial intention for a direction, a movement, a gesture, but the materials often take me elsewhere—and it’s usually better that way,” she says. “It’s about surrendering to the intelligence embedded in the medium.”
This surrender leads to a visceral exchange between the artist and the matter. “It comes from the body, sensation and especially desire,” Yanko says. “Desire, for me, is a medium. It’s a tool and a compass.” This pull between form and force—the tension between the form and formless—drives the work. “I think that’s something viewers can feel on a visceral level. It all comes from this internal place and translates directly into how the work is experienced.”
Her exhibition at Salon 94, “Retro Future,” makes this evolution tangible: a sprawling visual synthesis where past movements, present gestures and future visions collapse into one. Reconnecting to her painting roots, Yanko experiments with washes of pigment applied directly to the paint skins, expanding the conversation between color, material and form in both performative and pictorial terms.
“I wanted to create a space that reflects both where I’ve been and where I’m going,” she explains. “When I think about the architecture of tomorrow—about what it means to be creating at this moment—it doesn’t feel like it’s about building something entirely new or futuristic in the typical sense. It’s more about refining what already exists, expanding on the antiquated rather than erasing it.” She emphasizes how, for her, the act of creation is not about constructing some new towering monument meant to be timeless and stay forever but about breathing new life into something foundational.
Surrendering to the essentially chaotic and entropically fluid essence of reality, Yanko’s works are therefore more about a “fact” and “event” than a fixed image: both the figure and the contour collapse into color, into a coagulation of energies and tensions. The sculpture mirrors the body and reveals itself as a lively organism—fluid matter subject to forces that determine its continuous mutation and prevent any possibility of fixed individualization. “I think that’s the significance, and really the power, of abstraction. For me, abstraction is a guide,” Yanko says. “It’s not something you define or pin down. It leads you. It asks you to follow and observe without needing immediate understanding.”
Yanko’s show at James Cohan, “Epithets,” is a testament to this willingness to embrace the obscure nature of matter and its chaotic evolution as a way to participate in the mystery of creation. Hovering between a carcass and an exoskeleton, these types of sculptural simulacra of derelict bodies flicker in the space, immersed in dramatic dim light. Evoking relics of a crumbled industrial world or eerie, alien forms, these sculptures expose beauty in ruin, decay, exhaustion and the peril of disappearance. Yanko admits that the works in the downtown show are much more sinister and dark—a haunting prefiguration of some posthumous scenario: “The work is heavy and raw; it’s challenging. It comes from a part of myself I’ve been actively confronting and sitting with. It holds my pain, my shame, my ugliness, my distress.”
Here, sensuality, brutality, elegance and aggression coexist in a single resilient and resistant body. As totemic presences folded back on themselves, these sculptures ultimately function as reminders of the caducity of all things but also the potential for transformation in the inevitability of this eternal flux, a constant process of moving and becoming, forming and informing.
“It’s more about resisting that urge to define,” Yanko clarifies. “My belief in abstraction is that it’s something to surrender to—it’s not something you impose meaning onto. You let it take you. And in doing that, I think you open up so much more space for experience, expansion and understanding.”
As abstraction becomes a way to exercise and embrace the fluid nature of all things, Yanko’s sculptural choreography turns into the powerful metaphorical manifestation of the lifecycle of all material and physical presences—always existing in a continuum between generation, growth, decay and death but also driven by an essential transformation and potential renewal and rebirth in between.
“Our brains are wired to categorize, place, define—that’s how we make sense of the world. But I believe that evolution and consciousness begin when we become aware of that wiring,” the artist explains. “When we can witness it in real-time and choose instead to sit in observation. To hold space and let the object, the person, the artwork, the environment reveal itself over time—on its own terms.” In this sense, what Yanko has both projected in her work and enacted in the space is a physical and philosophical experience of this perpetual flux. “That’s where real expansion happens. That’s where new understanding begins—when we resist the need to fix something in place and instead allow ourselves to experience it.”
In this sense, her approach echoes Jungian thought—the alchemical process of unearthing the symbolic image buried within matter. “Jung isn’t someone I’ve studied extensively, but something in his thinking resonates—particularly the idea that obstacle is the conduit to consciousness,” she says. “You can’t truly access your consciousness without encountering pain. That’s stayed with me.”
Here Yanko confesses that in her work and in her life, she has found moments of discomfort and challenge that helped her come to the awareness that we cannot really separate from shadows. Confronting and embracing these as part of us can be where the deepest insights come from. “Jung’s ideas around transformation through confrontation, through engaging with the unconscious, feel very aligned with how I approach both my process and my sense of self.”
Timed with her double shows, Yanko has also curated a group show, “Metal and Memory,” at Salon 94, featuring artists who have inspired her or are close to her thinking in the way they push the definition of sculpture. The show includes works by Barbara Chase-Riboud, John Chamberlain, Leonardo Drew, Suzanne Jackson, Frank Stella, James Dinerstein and Kiah Celeste—all communal souls who share a similar approach and philosophy towards materials and making with the artist.
“When I was thinking about the curated show, I just asked myself: what would my dream room be?” Yanko says. “Who are the master materialists? The artists hitting on all fronts—execution, materiality, inventiveness—who are in a league of their own?” Her own work and her solo exhibitions are not just an homage but also a dialogue between kindred spirits, with Yanko posing new questions through every gesture, every skin and every sculpted scrap of metal, about the essence of reality and of all the things in it.
Kennedy Yanko’s “Retro Future” and “Epithets” are on view at Salon 94 and James Cohan, respectively, through May 10.
