For the 2023 edition of The Armory Show, Marlborough is delighted to present a solo presentation of gallery artist, Yulia Pinkusevich. Following inclusions in several group exhibitions held in Marlborough’s New York branch, The Armory Show marks the artist’s first solo project since joining the gallery in 2022. Presented here will be two core bodies of the artist’s work: The Sakha Series and The Isorithm Series.
Yulia Pinkusevich began The Sakha Series in 2020 after learning that her maternal ancestors were indigenous Siberians who practiced shamanism in Russia’s Sakha region, an area known for its harsh climate and extreme landscapes. In the 19th Century, the area’s indigenous peoples were brought to the brink of extinction at the hands of Russian settlers. Later, in the 1920s, Stalin’s regime would systematically purge shamanism, leaving the region with little lasting indigenous culture. Seeking to connect with her heritage, Pinkusevich began to learn about scientific insights built upon Indigenous cultural knowledge, bio-regeneration, and sustainable land stewardship. 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.” These new works embody the essence of natural elements such as fire, water, and air, drawing upon the rich history and mythologies of Ukraine, Siberia, and beyond. These “portraits” of the elemental forces acknowledge the spirituality of her ancestors as sources of inspiration and life.
Yulia Pinkusevich developed The Isorithm Series in tandem with The Headland Center for the Arts’s research for Double Vision, a collaborative project between Andrea Steves and Francois Hughes. Pinkusevich located a declassified Cold War era military manual, the contents of which provided instructions on how to create maps that would predict the impact of airbursts, including fatal and non-fatal casualty isorithms, created by nuclear bombs deployed in various habitable regions. The artist 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. In The Isorithm Series, Pinkusevich draws upon her personal experience of her Ukrainian-Russian upbringing in the USSR at the end of the Cold War, as well as the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, painting gestural and physical marks that react to and synthesize the complex relationship between the two countries. Like something out of a post-apocalyptic Tarkovsky film, these paintings contain no recognizable figures; instead, they are guided by the sensation of a conceived presence, perhaps our own. The artist’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 Kharkov, Ukraine (USSR). Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled the Eastern Bloc as refugees, immigrating to New York City. She was 8 years old at the time. Pinkusevich is a graduate of Rutgers University (2006) and holds her MFA from Stanford University (2012). Notable collections include the DeYoung Museum, Stanford University, Facebook 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 is currently the Joan Danforth Associate Professor of Studio Artat Mills College in Oakland, California (now a part of Northeastern University).
