Kennedy Yanko

Kennedy Yanko — What Unites Us

As part of the program devoted to dialogue between architecture and contemporary art, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine invites Kennedy Yanko, a leading American artist, to occupy its spaces. There she presents an unprecedented ensemble of sculptures designed to resonate with the Carlu Gallery’s plaster casts, offering a contemporary perspective on this space.

Originating from St. Louis, United States, Kennedy Yanko develops a practice at the crossroads of painting, sculpture and installation. An heir to Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and Color Field, she transforms salvaged materials, predominantly metal, into sculptural structures that she covers with acrylic paint. Her works thus combine the solidity of steel with the suppleness of color, in a permanent balance between strength and fragility.

Displayed within the Cité’s plaster-casts gallery, Kennedy Yanko’s works dialog with the masterpieces of French monumental sculpture. Installed opposite the portals and the sculpted figures, they extend the plays of folds, volumes and materials, while revealing the reverse sides of architectural structures, usually invisible. Their hybrid forms evoke the world of David Cronenberg. Without departing from the collections, they offer a contemporary reading, where architecture and sculpture, memory and creation, the past and the present resonate.

At the heart of her work lies the memory of materials. The metal, sourced from industrial scraps, preserves traces of its past uses (twists, impacts, oxidation) while the thick and pliant paint surfaces alternately evoke textile, skin or drapery. Between heaviness and movement, control and spontaneity, her sculptures give rise to organic forms where matter seems in perpetual metamorphosis.