Cuts by Yana Yunakova

Artist list

Yana Yunakova

Cuts is a small, limited series of functional objects made of porcelain. Through them Yana Yunakova studies and interprets the cut, its notional and material interpretation as part of the whole, a logically new fragment with its own meaning.

As early as her first exhibition in Testa gallery in 2001 – Seeds, Yana Yunakova has shown her artistic character – clear concept, expressed through a refined and soft artistic language, precise and delicate details.

For many of her previous works the artist finds inspiration in the processes of nature. She expresses her philosophy with clean, associative forms, sometimes austere and geometric, but invariably refined. Her colouring is graphic – black, white.

Yana Yunakova developed the concept for the series in her current exhibition in a long “cut” in time. She stopped at the sight of a pile of cut off Christmas trees, unsold and needless, having missed the holiday for which they had lived. The feeling evoked by this image found its expression in a small porcelain Christmas tree. The topic remained open. “After some time, several branches of the old birch in front of my balcony were cut off and the scars were covered in red paint. A perfect elliptic cut stares at me every day. I see the rhythm of the birch’s growth and development and yet again admiringly discover the perfect idea, set in everything surrounding us.”

The two images – of the Christmas tree and the cut off branches – overlap and the artist synthesizes them in the forms of the objects in the Cuts series. In her return as an author, emphatic in her expressiveness, Yana Yunakova presents clear, clean forms in white in a game of associations and words, which sets the beginning of a new stretch in her path.

- Yulia Portarova-2016-2016