Yulia was an Artist in Residence at Wassaic Project in upstate New York from February 29- March 13th, 2024

working along side the cohort which included : Cynthia Bittenfield, Lise Ellingsen, Bean Gilsdorf, Thea Gregorius‍, Mekko Harjo and Dove Hornbuckle

For her first solo exhibition in the UK, Regeneratrix, Bay Area artist Yulia Pinkusevich (b. 1982 Kharkiv, Ukraine) will present recent paintings from two ongoing bodies of work, The Sakha Series and The Isorithm Series, which excavate the layers of her cultural identity as a former citizen of the USSR. The Sakha Series depicts the artist's journey through time, meditating upon the connection with her ancient Eastern European and North Asian lineage to explore spirituality as a source of lifeforce. The latest large-scale paintings focus on the existence of our non-human kin, particularly embodying the essence of elements such as fire, water, and air. Accompanying The Sakha Series are works from The Isorithm Series. In these works, Pinkusevich draws on her Ukrainian and Russian identity and personal experience of growing up in the USSR at the end of the Cold War, as well as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. Her mark-marking is guided by gestures and physical movements that react to and synthesize the complex relationship between these two countries.

Yulia Pinkusevich selected as midnight Artist in September 2023

The large-scale video-based screen was designed by artist Jim Campbell, a dynamic LED installation at the crown of Salesforce Tower. The exterior of the top six floors are softly lit with 11,000 LEDs together capable of displaying low resolution moving color imagery.

Every night throughout the month of September 2023 Yulia Pinkusevich’s video titled Manifold will be projected for communal viewing, visible from 20 miles away playing at midnight daily and all day from Sept 20-24

For the 2023 edition of The Armory Show, the Directors of Marlborough are pleased to present Yulia Pinkusevich in her first solo presentation since joining the gallery in 2022. The artist was raised in the former USSR and came to America at a young age, though is continually informed by her Ukrainian heritage and the hardships she faced. We present two perspectives that form the core of her work.

In 2020, Pinkusevich began “The Sakha Series” after learning that her maternal ancestors were indigenous Siberians who practiced forms of shamanism in the Sakha region of Russia, known for its rich biodiversity, harsh climate, and extreme landscapes. Pinkusevich says of the foundation for the project, “I spent my childhood summers in these environments with my grandparents—but because native Siberians were brought to the brink of extinction by white Russian settlers in the nineteenth century, very little indigenous culture remained there by the time I was a child.” When Stalin’s regime then systematically purged shamanism in the 1920s, a mutigenerational amnesia around native heritage and sacred practices afflicted the region. These new works embody the essence of natural elements such as fire, water, and air, drawing upon the rich history and mythologies of ancient Ukraine, Siberia and beyond. These “portraits” of the elemental forces acknowledge the spirituality of her ancestors as a source of inspiration and life.

Accompanying “The Sakha Series” are works from “The Isorithm Series,” developed while an artist in residence at the Headland Center for the Arts and her research for Double Vision, a collaborative project with Andrea Steves and Francois Hughes. Pinkusevich located a Cold War-era declassified military manual which gave step by step instructions on how to create maps that predict the impact of nuclear bomb airbursts showing fatal and non-fatal casualty isorithms over particular types of habitable regions. She was struck by the immense tension between the elegant geometries and rational calculations of these maps, juxtaposed against the irrational chaos and mass destruction they represent. Pinkusevich draws on her Ukrainian and Russian identity and personal experience of growing up in the USSR at the end of the Cold War, as well as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, to create marks made by gestures and physical movements that react to and synthesize the complex relationship between these two countries. Like something out of a post-apocalyptic Tarkovsky film, Pinkusevich’s work contains no recognizable figures and is instead guided by the sensation of a conceived presence, perhaps our own. The play on time, or rather the lack thereof, coupled with the artists’s steady bend of visual perception, lifts the viewer out of the familiar and into an advanced, abstracted way of contemplating space and time. 

Yulia Pinkusevich was born in 1982 in Kharkiv, Ukraine (USSR). After immigrating to New York at age 8, Pinkusevich received a degree from Rutgers University (2006) and an MFA degree from Stanford University (2012). Notable collections include the de Young Museum, Stanford University, Meta HQ, Google HQ, and The City of Albuquerque. She has been awarded residency grants from Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Recology (San Francisco), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), and Headlands Center for the Arts, among others. The artist currently holds the Joan Danforth Associate Professorship of Studio Art at Mills College in Oakland, California (recently acquired by Northeastern University, Massachusetts). 
 

About Yulia Pinkusevich

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The Armory Show 
Stand 117
Javits Center Halls 3E, 3D, 3B 
429 11th Avenue (between 35th & 36th Street)
New York, NY 10001

VIP Hours
Thursday, September 7
VIP Passholders also have access to the fair before public hours

General Admission
Friday, September 8, 11–7pm 
Saturday, September 9, 11–7pm 
Sunday, September 10, 11–6pm 

R O U N D  W E A T H E R

Wind over Water 

​ September 3 - October 23, 2021

 Reception: Saturday September 11, 3-6 PM

Wind over Water is an exhibition that considers art as a meditation device and/or spiritual practice.  It includes meditative works by Shelley Hoyt, Rumi Koshino, Maisin artists, Nkiruka Oparah,

Yulia Pinkusevich, Jesse Schlesinger, Elizabeth Sims, Andrew Sungtaek, Paul Taylor, and

Rosie Lee Tompkins.

The exhibit’s title takes inspiration in the above artwork by Colter Jacobsen.  He focuses our attention onto how the words and ideas for Wind, Water, Mind, and Matter mirror each other, resulting in a pulsing of being, an evocation of spiritually- or metaphysically-infused highlights of language and visual art.  Gabriela Gonzalez Leal writes, "I look at art as a vehicle for meditation. [...] It leads the viewer to reflect on other realities."  Reflect on other realities, the artists of Wind over Water do.  As well as meditate upon the one at hand. 

Exhibition extended through September 29th, 2021

You are cordially invited to the opening night of SAKHA AESTHESIS, a solo exhibition by Yulia Pinkusevich at MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture. Join us for drinks, and meet the artist on our opening night on July 23rd, 5pm - 8pm.

MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is pleased to present Sakha Aesthesis, a solo exhibition by Yulia Pinkusevich.

What escapes erasure? Can the ancient enunciate the present? What are the knowledges, practices, and sensibilities that persist and spill over despite the flattened aesthetics of Eurocentric contemporaneity? 

Argentinian cultural scholar, Walter Mignolo, describes decolonial aesthesis as an expansion of the senses that resist and persist despite colonial modernity. Aesthesis, not aesthetics, inspire Indigenous practices to surge forth a multisensory realm of knowing, feeling, and living in the world. Urging memories, skills, and forgotten knowledges, aesthesis is no longer bracketed as folklore or myth, but is centered as the vantage of a radically decolonial contemporary art critique.

Oakland-based artist, Yulia Pinkusevich’s research-based and deeply personal presentation of the Sakha Earth, Mother, and Air spirit worlds pays homage to the Sakha peoples’ ecoharmonious relationship between nature and humanity.  When Stalin's regime systematically purged shamanism in the 1920s, a multigenerational amnesia around native heritage and sacred practices afflicted the region of Siberia. For Pinkusevich’s own family, this amnesia left the remnants of what seemed like strange, forgotten superstitions. In five large pastel paintings paired with a sculpture of a snake suspended from the gallery ceiling, Pinkusevich transforms the gallery into a rich sensory experience emblematic of Sakha decolonial aesthesis. Together, Pinkusevich’s works suture the folds and undo the divides between ancient and contemporary, material and spiritual, and feeling and knowing through a glimpse into the continuing practices of the arctic Sakha peoples.  

Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkov, Ukraine (USSR) with Siberian heritage. Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City. Since childhood, Pinkusevich’s worldview has been rooted in change.

Pinkusevich’s work has been featured in the United States and abroad including site-specific installations for Cite des Arts, Paris, Google HQ, Facebook HQ Menlo Park, Warehouse 21 Santa Fe, New Mexico, a Jail Cell Residency at Alter Space, Recology, San Francisco; and a public installation in Buenos Aires. She has received fellowships from the Headland Center for the Arts, The Goldwell Open Air Museum, and The Bay Area Public Art Academy.  Yulia has also been the recipient of the The Helen Wurlitzer Foundation Residency Grant, The San Francisco Foundation Phelan Murphy & Cadogan Award, and a number of Stanford University grants. Pinkusevich holds a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA from Stanford University. She is Associate Professor of Studio Art at Mills College, and lives and works in Oakland, California, on unceded Ohlone territory.

MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture is an artist-run space and think tank dedicated to exploring our global contemporary from the vantage of postcollapse art and theory. Our frames of reference begin with the human experiences from East Europe and West and Central Asia since the fall of the Berlin Wall but permeate to every corner of our diasporic world-presence.

Curated by: Ilknur Demirkoparan and Vuslat D. Katsanis, aka "ironbreaker sisters." This event is sponsored in part by the Regional Arts and Culture Council. 
 

Sakha Aesthesis 

At MinEastry of Postcollapse Art and Culture

2505 SE 11th Ave Suite 233

Portland, OR 97202

Opening reception: Friday, July 23, 2021 at 5pm-8pm

On view July 23, 2021 - September 29, 2021

Regular Gallery hours: Fri, Sat, Sun 12pm-5pm
 

Calm Under the Waves in the Blue of My Oblivion

a virtual exhibition by Yulia Pinkusevich

February 19 - April 18, 2021

Artist Talk & Opening Reception: February 19 at 12pm PST

Zoom Meeting ID: 869 9420 6840   PW: 977361

Artist Workshop: March 12 at 12pm PST

Please contact Michelle Ramin, Director of Archer Gallery, for inquiries. 360.992.2246 | www.clark.edu/archergallery | mramin@clark.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Yulia Pinkusevich: Rupture of the Mundane Plane

February 11, 2021 through April 2, 2021

(Palo Alto, CA) - Qualia Contemporary Art is pleased to present Rupture of the Mundane Plane by artist Yulia Pinkusevich. Rupture of the Mundane Plane showcases two recent bodies of work on paper from two series: Isorithm Maps and a new body of work entitled the Q-Series.  In her evolving practice, Pinkusevich has created a bold, visual language that engages interconnection, musicality, space and materiality to explore the transference of energy over time. Rupture of the Mundane Plane contextualizes this ethos through an arresting juxtaposition of meditation, intuitive spontaneity, and gestural mark making. The exhibition is open to the public from February 11, 2021 through April 2, 2021. The gallery will be hosting a Zoom opening celebration on February 13, at 7:30 pm PST. RSVP is required. To RSVP, please visit http://www.qualiacontemporaryart.com/

The Isorithm series grew out of Pinkusevich’s research on the Cold War. During this research, the artist located a declassified military manual which served as a guide to teach military personnel how to create maps that predict the casualty impact of nuclear air bursts . Pinkusevich was struck “by the immense tension between the elegant geometries and rational calculations of these maps, juxtaposed against the irrational chaos and mass destruction they represent.” The works are made up of a series of red lined grids, overlayed with topography like concentric circles and abstracted marks; all melding together in a seemingly rhythmic dance. The term 'isorhythm” is borrowed from a 13th-century musical phrase used to describe things of the same rhythm. The repetitive mapping quality of the work instantiates the exchange of energy within it, both physically and conceptually. Without knowing the work’s nuclear source, one is still able to sense its buzzing energy, ready to explode with life.

Pinkusevich’s Q-Series began while the artist was in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic. The small, amoebic works are made using a slow meditative process in which the artist places a single ink mark  on the paper for every breath she takes. Pinkusevich then connects these marks with fine red pencil lines as a meditation on form, social connection and biological networks. The intimate works follow an internal logic and poses a scientific visual language. Just like a physical body, they have the ability to heal, grow and regenerate a sense of being. 

Pinkusevich uses materiality and process in her practice as a way to expand on the interconnectedness and historical aspects often found in her work. Both series in Rupture the Mundane Plane use a preservation technique the artist discovered while working with 12th century illuminated manuscripts, in which natural beeswax was used to seal  the drawings and texts. Pinkusevich not only uses beeswax as a way to seal her marks, but it also adds an interesting depth of color and a natural fragrance. All of the materials Pinkusevich uses (charcoal, ink, paper, beeswax), have a primordial feeling to them and physically connect the work to different spaces, times and energy.

The work in Rupture of the Mundane Plane is mathematical, algorithmic, geometric, all of which acts as a set of rules that guides Pinkusevich through her process. Within these limitations, Pinkusevich is able to find metaphysical networks of life, connection, rhythm, emotion and spontaneity.

About Yulia Pinkusevich 

Yulia Pinkusevich is an artist and educator born in Kharkov, Ukraine (USSR). Upon the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the eastern bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City in the 90’s. She holds a Masters of Fine Arts from Stanford University and Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of the Arts, graduating both universities with highest honors. Yulia has exhibited nationally and internationally including site-specific projects executed in Paris, France and Buenos Aires, Argentina. 

Presenting an immersive visual environment that stays true to an architectural design methodology is an ongoing pursuit for Pinkusevich. It is ever present in her installations using common materials and found objects, it is how she guides her examination of urban and natural systems. Pinkusevich’s work is in the public collection of the DeYoung Museum, Stanford University, Facebook HQ, Google HQ and the City of Albuquerque. Yulia has been awarded residency grants from Gray Area Arts Foundation, Wildlands, Lucid Arts Foundation, Autodesk Pier 9, Facebook, Recology (San Francisco Dump), Cite des Arts International (Paris), Headlands Center for the Arts, Redux, Goldwell Open Air Museum and The Wurlitzer Foundation. She was also the recipient of The San Francisco Foundations Phelan, Murphy & Cadogan Fellowship in the Fine Arts as well as numerous other awards. Yulia’s work has been widely written about in various publications, including New American Painting, Stanford Magazine, DeYoung Magazine, VICE, The Miami Herald, Dwell, Adbusters, KQED, Rhizome. Yulia has lectured at Stanford University and is currently Associate Professor at Mills College in Oakland California, she lives and creates her work on unceded Ohlone land. 

About Qualia Contemporary Art

Located in the heart of downtown Palo Alto, Qualia Contemporary Art is dedicated to showcasing outstanding established and emerging artists working in a variety of media. The gallery is committed to building lasting relationships with artists, collectors, curators, and scholars nationally and internationally, and providing a vital platform for dialogues on contemporary art and culture in the Bay Area and beyond.

Location

328 University Ave

Palo Alto, CA 94301

Gallery Contact 

Dacia Xu

650-656-9132

dacia@qualiagallery.com

Media Contact

Lainya Magaña, A&O PR 

347 395 4155 

lainya@aopublic.com

Artist Talk at PAAC via ZOOM

Palo Alto Art Center:

On Friday, March 12, 5 pm.—Yulia Pinkusevich will speak via Zoom about her work. Register here.

This exhibition will feature artists who have immigrated to the United States and whose experiences are reflected in their art practice. There are more foreign-born residents in Santa Clara County (of which Palo Alto is a part) than in any other county in California, about 38% of the population. In a state that has more immigrants than any other (in fact, half of California children have at least one immigrant parent) and a country than has a larger immigrant population than any other in the world, this is a truly meaningful statistic and one we choose not to ignore.

For those of us who have never known what it feels like to be treated as an “other,” the artists in this exhibition have done us a great service. By examining and expressing their experiences, they help us to be more compassionate, more knowledgeable citizens. In the midst of the confusion and outrage permeating immigration policy today, one thing is abundantly clear: these artists have a tremendous amount to add to the cultural and artistic prosperity of our nation.

In September of 2020 this drawing titled Casualty Isorithm 2, was selected to be included in the DeYoung Open exhibition. The work on paper was subsequent selected for acquisition by Karin Brewer Curator in Charge of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts.

About the DeYoung Open:

In celebration of the de Young museum’s 125th anniversary, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are hosting The de Young Open, a juried community art exhibition of submissions by artists who live in the nine Bay Area counties: Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma.

Works of art in The de Young Open are hung “salon-style,” installed edge to edge and floor to ceiling, which enables a maximum number of works to be displayed. The de Young filled the 12,000-square-foot Herbst Exhibition Galleries with 877 artworks by 762 Bay Area artists in The de Young Open.

A NEW IMMERSIVE ART EXPERIENCE
COMING FEBRUARY 7, 2020
 

Reimagine your relationship with the living world — and make the planetary personal.
 

Limited number of time slots are available for the Opening Weekend. 

GET TICKETS

This exhibition is a production by the Experiential Space Research Lab at Gray Area, supported by Knight Foundation. In collaboration with Gaian Systems, the Research Lab supports a diverse team of artists exploring the potential of experiential spaces for social impact. 

Artists: Brenda (Bz) Zhang, Celeste Martore, Jonathon Keats, Kelly Skye, Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Orestis Herodotou, Rena Tom, Romie Littrell, Stephanie Andrews, Stephen Standridge, and Yulia Pinkusevich.

LEARN MORE

Between Them: An Installation Composed of Drawings
13 July - 17 August, 2019

Opening reception: Saturday, July 13 from 4 - 6 PM

Ten of my works on paper are a part of this unique exhibition featuring close to 200 drawings spanning the 16th to 21st centuries from European Old Masters to work made utilizing technology, from South American geometric abstraction to photo-realism, drawing directly on the wall, drawing on three-dimensional objects, drawings made only of paper and one drawn both with and on graphite, this is an exploration of the intimacy, immediacy and pleasure of drawing. 

More details about this exhibition can be found here. 

Artists include Ruth Asawa, Antonio Asis, Chris Ballantyne, Rina Banerjee, Robert Bechtle, Judith Belzer, Dike Blair, Michael Buthe, Alexander Calder, Alessandro Casolini, Max Cole, Tyrell Collins, Bruce Conner, Jonathan Delafield Cook, Russell Crotty, Reed Danziger, Hugo de Marziani, Jay DeFeo, Gustavo Díaz, Fortunato Duranti, Jacob El Hanani, Nicole Phungrasamee Fein, León Ferarri, Roland Flexner, Gajin Fujita, Alicia Mihai Gazcue, Alberto Giacometti, Max Gimblett, Nancy Graves, Zarina Hashmi, Tim Hawkinson, Eva Hesse, Kein Imao, Chusei Inagaki, Colter Jacobsen, Jacob Jordaens, Yokoi Kinkoku, Isabella Kirkland, David Klamen, Stefan Kürten, Crystal Liu, Antonio Lizárraga, José Antonio Suárez Londoño, Claire Lukas, Emil Lukas, Marco Maggi, Gerhard Mayer, Tyeb Mehta, Nasreen Mohamedi, John O’Reilly, Maruyama Okyo, Gabriel Orozco, Driss Ouadahi, Nam June Paik, Giovanni Battista Paggi, Raymond Pettibon, Yulia Pinkusevich, Liliana Porter, Ken Price, Angelina Pwerle, Lordy Rodriguez, Nagasawa Rosetsu, Ed Ruscha, Fred Sandback, Andrew Schoultz, Shahzia Sikander, Mark Tansey, Paul Thek, Ana Tiscornia, Ignacio Uriarte, Cornelius Völker, William T. Wiley, Hannah Wilke and William Wood.

BUILT ENVIRONMENTS

February 23 – April 4, 2019

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 23rd, 1–3pm

The exhibition examines artistic interventions both inside and outside of the gallery space, where spatial relations and the routine materials of architecture and construction are exploded through artistic experimentation. Featuring: Sheila Ghidini, Bessma Khalaf, Mary Anne Kluth, Beth Krebs, Lead Pencil Studio, Cyble Lyle, MACRO WAVES, Sung Eun Park, Nate Petterson, Yulia Pinkusevich, Stephanie Robison, Andrew Schoultz, Clint Sleeper, and Patrick D. Wilson.

Organized by Sharon E. Bliss and Kevin B. Chen

PLEASE NOTE: THE GALLERY WILL BE CLOSED ON MARCH 27, 28 AND 29 FOR THE SFSU SPRING RECESS.

Friday, August 3rd

Local Language

Oakland, California

The goal of the Lucid Art Residency Program is to provide artists with a serene, retreat-like natural environment for creative exploration and inquiry into arts and consciousness.

The Lucid Art Foundation encourages exploration of nonrepresentational art through multimedia, conceptual, ecological, and interdisciplinary approaches. During the three-week residency (generally taking place from March to November of each year), artists will have the opportunity to explore the practice of lucid art, with special emphasis on the integration of art, process, and inner awareness. Through this practice, a deeper foundation is created that fosters individual artistic growth and development, as well as the understanding of the artist's role in society.

What It’s Like to Be an Artist in Residence at Facebook

By Casey Lesser

Oct 31, 2017

Stones Unturned

Solo exhibition at Black Crown Gallery, Oakland 

June 30 - August 5, 2017

The Recollection of Stones Unturned is a solo exhibition of “hybrid paintings” by Yulia Pinkusevich that examine the collaboration between humans and machines in these early days of extraterrestrial exploration. Drawing upon photographs taken by autonomous robots from the Martian surface and employing the latest laser-based technologies as a tool for creating, Pinkusevich considers the position of humankind in a present in which speculative fictions are becoming technological realities—our machine-aided capabilities expanding the reach of our species in both space and time.

Central to Pinkusevich’s work is the pivotal moment in which robots—as proxies for humans—began simultaneously making photographs of and altering the terrain of Mars. The resulting images gaze back into the deep time of extraterrestrial geologies—landscapes formed over the course of eons—while the interventions look forward as the starting point of a possible future of human interplanetary colonization. These excavations into the Martian ground are echoed in the process of creating these “hybrid paintings”; Pinkusevich employs laser cutters to etch through layers of hand-applied acrylic paint, each pass revealing a new color and further resolving the image. The etched surface of the resulting works begin to take on a topographic dimension, visually paralleling the landscapes depicted. In completing the pieces by drawing over and under the paint surface with colored pastels, Pinkusevich recapitulates the human-machine authorship of the original photographs.

For many of the works on display artifact takes on a dual presence: the image itself as an artifact of contemporary technology, produced in part for the consideration of future generations; and digital artifacts evident as errors, inclusions and blank spots as a result of the many transmissions and translations that the photographic images are subjected to between exposure and painting. The binary presence of artifact speaks to the imprecise translation from technologically-produced data to human experience, and the impossibility of projecting with any clarity the future of humanity.

Thanks to SFMoMA Artist Gallery who curates this space at 901 Market St, San Francisco CA. On View through February 2017.  

The Recollections of Stone Unturned

November 4 – December 23, 2016

Kent Fine Art

New York, NY