Yulia Pinkusevich

ABOUT

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Yulia Pinkusevich is a San Francisco Bay Area based visual artist and educator, working primarily in drawing, painting and installation. She creates projects and large-scale environments that consider our ecological and social systems. Her work observes land critically, focusing on the psychology of spaces that sentient beings inhabit. Using art as a vehicle to merge physical and psychological parallels, she creates work that centers empathetic and historic perspectives in order to tackle contemporary challenges.

Her background itself is rooted in change. Born and raised in the USSR at a time of great political upheaval and uncertainty. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She later relocated to California first to attend college and later graduate school, continuing to reside in the Bay Area to this day. Her work stems from her identity as an immigrant of Siberian & Ukrainian roots. Her art explores dualities and the complex relationships between her blended identity and home countries. Formally, the work is engaged with the direct experience of the viewer through perspectival illusion and spatial perception that play with the subconscious and cognitive understanding of space. By breaking logical perspectives she creates illusions of impossible spaces, non-places or utopias that shift the viewpoint to the panoptic.

ARTIST BIO:

Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkiv, Ukraine (USSR). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City later New Mexico and California. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, earning both with high honors. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including site-specific projects executed in Paris, France and Buenos Aires, Argentina and London, UK and Athens, Greece.

Yulia’s art is in the public collection of the deYoung Museum , Legion of Fine Art San Francisco, Stanford University, Facebook/Meta HQ, Google HQ, Recology, Industry Capitol and the City of Albuquerque amongst others. She was awarded the 2024 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship at the National Air and Space Museum in DC. Other fellowships include Autodesk Pier 9, Recology, Cite des Arts International (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts, and Vashon AIR, Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wassaic Project, Lucid Arts Foundation, amongst others. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently an Associate Professor of Studio Art at the College of Art Media and Design & Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, California. She lives and creates works on unceded Ohlone territory. Yulia’s work is represented by Kutlesa Gallery, Switzerland/New York.

Follow me on Instagram @YuliaPink for work in progress and mostly studio updates.