Sonja Yakovleva





Sonja Yakovleva
Contact | Aylin Kowalewsky |
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Year | 2023 |
Edition | 5 unique works |
Technique | Paper cuts |
Image Size | Dicksucker: 23 x 20 cm; Fragolini: 22.5 x 20.5 cm; Have a nice weekend II: ∅ 25.5 cm; Tischdildo: 15 x 10 cm; XXL: 16.5 x 19.5 cm |
Price | Dicksucker: € 1.600; Fragolini: € 1.600; Have a nice weekend II: € 1.900; Tischdildo: € 900; XXL: € 900 (incl. 19% VAT) |
Details | signed verso |
Sonja Yakovleva (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) finds inspiration for her paper cuts in pornographic images from magazines or the internet. In this way, Yakovleva injects empowerment into a medium that is associated with domesticity and femininity; her motifs reflect her sex-positive feminist convictions. For DCV, the artist has put her typically very large formats aside to pick small sheets of paper in an innocent white, which she manually cuts into exceptionally delicate “lace doilies.”
Books on Sonja Yakovleva
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Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands50€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva’s (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) silhouettes are informed by her sex-positive feminist views. They mix and match pornography with art-historical references, folkloristic motifs, fairy tales, and myths that have served to ingrain misogynistic, racist, and homophobic ideologies in the collective consciousness since the Middle Ages. The dissemination of such materials was facilitated by the paper cut, a medium that encouraged simplified graphical representations and was seen as domestic and appropriate for women. Yakovleva’s intentions in adopting it, however, are contrarian: her iridescent silhouettes grapple with women’s stories, precarious gray areas, power relations, representation, sexuality, and violence in novel ways.
Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
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Sonja Yakovleva
10€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) uses pornographic representations and images from the internet as templates for papercuts, some in large formats, that grapple with personal and public stories about women, power relations, sexuality, and violence. The silhouettes show popular motifs that have served to ingrain fairy tales, myths, and ideologies in the collective consciousness from the colonial era to modernism and the early twenty-first century. Yakovleva, whose art is often associated with sex-positive feminism, appropriates this folkloristic visual idiom and hybridizes and sexualizes it. Dessous and strap-on dildos, for example, figure as preserved specimens of butterflies and insects, bringing historic scientific expeditions to mind. Yet her work also addresses the capitalist urge to categorize, evaluate, and market every kink.