Yulia Gassio

Updated: 15 Sep 2023

Native to Ukraine but residing in the United States, Yulia practices art in California. Her development as an artist was shaped in the environment of CSU Fresno and CSU Long Beach. Trained as an Art Historian in her first master's degree, she has been exposed to the diverse art history of Western and Eastern civilizations. The figurative arts' transformation over time was the perfect marriage of both her interest in artistic creation and history; she feels it most accurately and evocatively depicts historical narratives. As a figurative painter, Yulia concentrates on images of the human form. She believes human figures represent sensuousness directly linked to our psychology and illustrates the human condition. In her opinion, the human figure is the most profound and benevolent way to convey complex social, political, and personal stories while showing the fragility and value of human life.

 

Yulia's artistic processes are deeply rooted in working from direct observation. Her sentiment is that the process of reformatting a physical three-dimensional object onto a two-dimensional surface is an act of abstraction, as artists have to reduce to create the optical illusion of volume on a flat picture plane. From her standpoint, visual representation transcends barriers of time and spoken languages to deliver evocative messages regarding the beliefs and societal changes reflective of power dynamics at the time of production.