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Sonja Yakovleva

Tanga Tanga!

22 APRIL – 04 JUNE 2022
Robert Grunenberg is delighted to present Tanga Tanga! by Sonja Yakovleva.

Solo Exhibition:
Sonja Yakovleva
Tanga Tanga!
Robert Grunenberg
22.04.2022 – 04.062022

Sonja Yakovleva’s work questions the ideology behind material value and social inequality. Located on the boundary between art and handicraft, she shows paper cuttings of alternative realities that often depict female protagonists. Yakovleva stresses that her choice of material is considered more feminine than it should be – in reality, it is rare that a handcraft is dominated by women. Yet in terms of content, her work is full of revealing observations of patriarchal structures and heteronormative power relations.

The Frankfurt-based artist confronts these moments of absence as a point of transition between a view from nowhere and an imagined feminine retrospective. Glorious histories, uncelebrated celebrations, kitsch epic poems, and female struggles become motives of a study of the unstated, the unseen, and the placeless. In Yakovleva’s images, femininity manifests itself beyond its figurative and representational depictions and appears as a functional principle of creative negativity.

Thus, the inversion of the impossible, the forgotten, and the unsaid has an effect on the level of reception: the extraordinary amount of effort and material that goes into her pieces play with the attributes of “laboriousness” and “being diligent”. These ascriptions are more likely to be applied to tasks that are female or domestic in nature, or to eager schoolgirls, in contrast to the narratives of artistic genius reserved for men. In Yakovleva’s work, this diligence becomes a destructive force and the medium a showplace for excess.  In the exhibition, a large wall installation and paper cuts will be presented. 

Sonja Yakovleva (b.1989) currently lives and works in Frankfurt and Berlin. Yakovleva studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach with Heiner Blum, Mariola Brillowska, and Juliane Rebentisch.

For more information, please contact the gallery: mail@robertgrunenberg.com