2021 - Sweet Dreams, Nosferatu | Presented by Art Basel Parcours 2021
Sweet Dreams, Nosferatu - Featured during Art Basel Parcours 2021
Usually dreams are private, not directly accessible to anyone but the dreamer. In Yuli Yamagata’s work for Art Basel Parcours, these dreams have escaped and found their way into a bedding shop, setting us up for a wild night’s sleep.
Making use of techniques including embroidery, upholstery, and painting, her unique visual language oscillates between sculpture, painting, and installation. The unusual exploration of shapes, ranging from anthropomorphism to hybrid creatures and disproportionate objects, has led to a practice that is rooted in pop culture and encompasses objects and creatures that verge on the absurd.
The creatures and objects appear friendly and threatening at the same time. Displayed in the space, they assume a personality of their own, seemingly having secret conversations with the other creatures around them. The formal alternations between bulky and slim, gigantic and tiny, intensify this sentiment.
The multidisciplinary artist Yuli Yamagata (born 1989 in São Paulo) creates joyful, often humorous, and vividly colorful installations, sculptures, and painted objects out of sewn and upholstered canvases. The theatrical pieces often feature body parts, particularly faces, legs, lips, and fingers, which call into question concepts of taste, consumerism, and self-image.
Yamagata blends Surrealist imagery seamlessly with pop culture, playing with dimensions and shapes to create dysmorphic, sometimes comically absurd objects and creatures that convey a familiar strangeness. Or a strange familiarity.
Full publication on Art Basel website here
Art Basel, Switzerland
Passion for beds
September 21 to September 26, 2021.