Kennedy Yanko

Working with paint skins and found metal, Kennedy Yanko constructs sublime sculptures and architecturally scaled installations that defy the limits of their own materiality. Steeped in the visual language of Abstract Expressionism, Action, and Color Field Painting, Yanko’s works cast off the boundaries of their medium, occupying the generative spaces between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, surreal and earthbound. 

Central to Yanko’s practice is her work with paint skins – a material created by pouring many gallons of paint onto a flat surface that is lifted and shaped into a tarp-like entity once it’s nearly dry. Yanko positions these abstracted painterly gestures within the meticulously crafted metal armatures she has sourced, welded, torched, and bent. The process of marrying paint with metal is laborious, requiring both power and innovation to twist and mold the skins onto their dynamic salvaged supports. 

Despite the conspicuous solidity of Yanko’s materials, her sculptures and installations often appear weightless – as if they were on the verge of taking flight or drawing breath. By employing paint skin and metal in ways that both transmute a bodily essence and reposition the logic of gravity and form, Yanko works to expand and challenge the limits of her viewers' perception. 

This troubling of the metaphysical, an outgrowth of Yanko’s diverse philosophical interests, is at the core of the artist’s practice. A long-time follower of Daoism and an avid student of theosophic ideologies, Yanko’s cyclic repurposing of her materials alludes to the infinite possibilities for their reinterpretation through the very act of making. For Yanko, abstraction is a vehicle for encountering clarity — the pulse of intuition mixed with the thrill of a chance encounter. In the making, the artist becomes a conduit for future systems for renewal and regeneration. 

Kennedy Yanko debuted a series of sculptures that fuse paint and metal at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. Her newest body of work echoes poetry, holding memory and carrying a specific cadence and rhythm. Matter is both contained and free-flowing—a poignant response to Koyo Kouoh’s invitation to journey, reflect, and commune. A monumental suspended sculpture anchors the Arsenale, flanked by two free-standing works. The central sculpture, The bond between matter and heaven, 2025 celebrates the color blue, exploring not its visual power, but also its psychological resonances. Its body, formed from a shipping container that was ripped and torn into individual pieces, is hand-painted and enmeshed with soft folds of paint skins against  hard metal. Together, these works  serve as an ode and an invocation, offering a portal that opens up to the sky. 

Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis, MO) has been included in significant exhibitions at the Albertina Modern (2024); Brooklyn Museum (2022; 2024); CFHill (2022); Parrish Art Museum (2022); Rubell Museum (2021), where she was the 2021-2022 Artist in Residence and first sculptor to hold the residency; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2019). Yanko’s work is held in major private and institutional collections such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL; Espacio Tacuari, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Firestorm Foundation, Stockholm, Sweden; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL; Rubell Museum, Miami, FL; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC;  Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; and Stora Väsby Sculpture Park, Upplands Väsby, Sweden. Yanko lives and works in Miami, FL.