Pace Prints is pleased to announce Without Gravity, an exhibition of new multilayered handmade paper works by Kennedy Yanko. The exhibition will be on view from September 5 – October 4, 2025, at 536 West 22nd Street, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 4 from 6-8pm. Without Gravity marks Yanko’s first solo exhibition at Pace Prints.
On September 6 from 4-5pm, Pace Prints will host a conversation at the gallery between the artist and Douglas Dreishpoon, Chief Curator Emeritus at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Director of the Catalogue Raisonné Project at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.
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To create this new body of work, Yanko engaged in multiple sessions at the Pace Paper studio between July 2024 and June 2025, experimenting with the papermaking process for the first time. Over the course of a year, she developed a personal vocabulary of innovative techniques that mirror the large, gestural movements and material rigor of her expressive sculptures. By pouring, staining, and manipulating highly pigmented paper pulp, the artist engaged the medium with a deep sense of immediacy and physical intimacy — her hands submerged in water, moving with the rhythm of the hydraulic press, or enveloped by the material itself.
Echoing the draped paint skins of her sculptural work, Yanko began these paper pieces by pouring diluted pigments on a base layer of luminous monochromatic paper to create delicate, compositionally soft forms. She then built-up additional layers through various methods, including using the studio’s hydraulic press to “explode” cotton paper pulp and transfer these dynamic bursts onto larger compositions. The automatic nature of this technique allowed for the organic creation of sculptural crevices and channels into which pigment could pool and marbleize.
Yanko’s own body became a mark-making tool in her process through a technique she refers to as “arm drawing,” where the length of her forearm was used to spread and shape clusters of fiber gathered across a gridded screen. These sweeping formations were then transferred onto the final pieces, creating textural layers at an anthropomorphic scale.
Renowned for her sculptures, this exhibition reintroduces Yanko as a painter. In her words, “[it] marks a return to two-dimensional making, but through a medium that feels entirely new. It reawakened something in my practice —a different kind of play, a different kind of rigor — and opened a new chapter in how I relate to material, gesture, and form.”
The works included in Without Gravity suggest ambiguous geographies, like imagined islands or bodies of water, resembling aerial maps drawn by the artist’s own body. At once evoking the natural world and the cosmos, they nod to Impressionist landscape traditions, while simultaneously referencing the infinite expanse of celestial bodies. This sense of expansiveness is exemplified in the large-scale work Light as Waves, which invites viewers to investigate its textured topography, floating from one form to the next. These works exist in the liminal space between painting and object, suspended in a visual weightlessness.
As a colorist, Yanko departed from her typical palette of rusty, metallic hues, turning instead to saturated yellows, reds, blues, and greens. This new chromatic range emerged out of the unique drying process inherent in papermaking, which can mute unsaturated color. Drawing inspiration from artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Sam Gilliam, works like Implicit Raster, Single Gesture, and Picture Plane juxtapose radiant colors with deeper, darker swaths of pigment that pulse with aqueous movement and intuitive choreography.
Presented alongside Without Gravity, Pace Prints will also feature a selection of prints and editions curated by Yanko in Gallery 2 of 536 West 22nd Street. This grouping includes works by Helen Frankenthaler, Sam Gilliam, and James Turrell.
Please contact us at info@paceprints.com to inquire or request any additional information.