Vielmetter Los Angeles is pleased to announce our first solo exhibition of Kennedy Yanko’s work, “Salient Queens.” Opening on October 10, 2020, the exhibition features a series of sculptures that both combine and juxtapose found metal with supple colored paint skins. The resulting conversations between these fundamentally opposite materials create striking forcefields within each sculpture where the impact of pressure applied to the metal contrasts sharply with the smoothly draped painterly skins that spill forth from cracks and openings in the powerfully bent metal.

A starting point in developing the works in this exhibition was inspiration drawn from women who played a formative role in Yanko’s life. The sculptures are forceful impressions of their environment and respond to the soft and supple elegance of their draped “skins,” becoming symbolic representations of these women’s life force.

Yanko pulls metal and other materials from salvage yards and sits in dialogue with them, listening as each piece reveals its true nature and intention. Her paint skins, once dried, become a sculptural material, taking hold of their metal counterparts until the disparate materials merge and become indistinguishable from one another and together take a different form entirely.

Yanko’s use of color narrates the sensation of the new worlds she builds, articulating the paint skins’ swooping folds, measured creases, and essential shadows. While the coloring of the metal parts is beautifully aged and shows the distressed surface of a material that has undergone impactful acts of pressure, the paint skins respond with subtly colored shades respecting the given character of the metal and empathizing its aged beauty.

In the exhibition, the sculptures are placed to both respond to and activate the exhibition space. Some seem to protrude from the floor while others are suspended from the ceiling, creating a rich and invigorating spatial experience. Yanko’s work is sometimes placed on pedestals, offering the viewer a birds-eye view of a living landscape. Other pieces hang off the wall—jagged edges thrusting forward, soft skins spilling to the ground. Still, others occupy a space between floor and ceiling, hanging from hooks or appearing to drip from an invisible crack in space.

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988) is a Brooklyn-based artist who debuted sculptures from her “Elements and Skin” series as part of a Derrick Adams-curated group show, “Hidden in Plain Sight” at Jenkins Johnson Project Space. Brooklyn, NY in 2017. In 2019, Yanko’s work was featured in 3 solo exhibitions: Highly Worked (Denny Dimin Gallery, NY), Hannah (Kavi Gupta, Chicago), and Before Words (UICA, Grand Rapids. She also installed her first public sculpture, 3 WAYS, on the Poydras Corridor in New Orleans in collaboration with The Helis Foundation and the Ogden Museum of Art. In 2019, Yanko was named Art Forum’s “Critic’s Pick,” received a Colene Brown Art Prize awarded by BRIC Arts Media, and was featured in 100 Sculptors of Tomorrow published by Thames & Hudson. In the last couple of years, Yanko has also exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Parallels and Peripheries curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah) and at the University of South Florida (Life During WarTime, curated by Christian Viveros). Her work is included in the collections of JP Morgan Chase and TD Bank, among others.

The gallery is located at 1700 S Santa Fe Avenue, south of the 10 freeway. The Gallery is currently open by appointment only. Please book an appointment here. For further information and press inquiries, please contact Olivia Gauthier at [email protected] and Jessie Cohen at [email protected].