Yvonne Petkus | Traces, Forces, Actions
May 9 - June 7, 2025
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Artist Statement 

As a process-driven artist, I am invested in painting as a physical act of thinking and in mark making as a living action. Searching for both material and image-based resonances, I explore ideas of struggle, the residues of trauma and persistence, and existential vulnerability and strength (sometimes all found in a single gesture, like a dash or a run). Realizations are found through the additive and subtractive act of painting, through an intense questioning, and in the freedom of image invention that painting allows. Each piece is about, acts as, a meditation, a grasping – a search for meaning.

Using a repeated, mediated figure and the relationship between each figure and their environment, the aim is to give voice to what we carry and hold just under the skin, expressed as fragments, accumulations, and glimpses. Found over time and through layers, struggled over, connections are able to surface slowly, organically, as an acknowledgement of the codified language of painting, the knowing, paired with the use of that language to go beyond its known self, the not-knowing. The overarching goal is to use visceral cues and a shifting, layered surface as evidence of a larger human struggle.

Embedded into each painting is a catalogue of indexes that continues to develop over time. These include responses to cultural sources, recent personal and world events, and work conducted in Iceland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and most recently Italy, where several of the paintings presented here were created. As an ongoing negotiation of traces, forces, and actions, the work acts as evidence of this studio-based processing, cognitively, visually, and physically, where seemingly divergent inputs and sources can move through and past any immediate specifics toward their larger implications, while hopefully offering space for contemplation, reflection, and understanding.
The paintings across Traces, Forces, and Actions also represent recent exploration into cases for a new sublime in contemporary painting, where I have found that the term "weight" has supplanted the word "sublime" in what I propose through my work and research. It is about the pressure points that have emerged in our current times. Not the Sublime of the past, the larger-large or terrible awesome, but rather a "weight", found incrementally through a million small-bigs – that add up, affect, distort, inform – as forces for a similar question of our relationship to what now terrifies, to what now awes.


Artist Biography

Originally from New Jersey and with degrees from Syracuse University (BFA) and the University of Washington (MFA), artist Yvonne Petkus explores ideas of struggle, vulnerability and strength, and the forces of nature against the body through her process-based paintings. She is committed to a discourse of ideas through teaching (at Western Kentucky University) and through an ongoing schedule of national and international exhibitions. Honors include awards from the Great Meadows Foundation, Kentucky Arts Council, Kentucky Foundation for Women, and in recently being named University Distinguished Professor. She also served as the U.S. Juror on the jury panel for the 2023 ZVONO Award in Bosnia-Herzegovina and continues to serve as a visiting artist at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, New York each year (for awardees from similar competitions in Central and Eastern Europe). She has presented her work at conferences of the College Art Association, SECAC, and the Athens Institute (in Athens, Greece), attended artist residencies in New York, Vermont, Iceland, and, most recently, Italy (2024), and was chosen for the ZSEIFS Fellowship Program in Bosnia in 2017. Following this fellowship, Petkus curated an international exhibition of work by twelve artists titled Proof of Existence: An Exhibit of Work by Contemporary Artists of Bosnian and Balkan Origin and has since presented the results of this curatorial work and her own ongoing studio research in venues around the country and world, including in Sarajevo at the KUMA International Center for Visual Art from Post-Conflict Societies Conference on Contemporary Art, and as a panel member for the Austria-based podcast "Contemporary Matters". Petkus is represented by the Moremen Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky and her work has been critically reviewed in the journal Under Main. Throughout her roles, Petkus has seen the power that artwork has to give voice, to challenge, and to connect; and uses her work and work with other artists to provide the space, discourse, and material evidence of that power.