Artist
Sonja Yakovleva
Born 1989 in Potsdam, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main
Sonja Yakovleva works mainly in paper cut, from intimate pieces made with scissors to installations cut with a blade that run to more than ten metres, alongside drawing, gouache, glass and performance. Yakovleva is drawn to paper cutting for its craft character and its ambivalent place in European art history, and sets this seemingly harmless technique against explicit, erotic content, a field that is widely consumed yet taboo and devalued. Her subjects are bodies and power: sexuality, beauty and body optimisation, fitness culture and labour, with crowded scenes of workers, delivery drivers and building sites that draw on 1920s Soviet agitprop and Diego Rivera's murals. Cut in white against black paper, the figure becomes a silhouette, and the slow, meticulous handwork runs counter to the speed at which such images are usually consumed.
