The Soft Edge of Being. Volodymyr Yushchenko
10.11.2022 - 23.12.2022
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Atticus Art Gallery is delighted to present The Soft Edge of Being, a quietly arresting exhibition of recent works by Volodymyr Yushchenko, on view until 23 December 2022. Bringing together three intimately connected bodies of work — a drawing from 2021, a large chromogenic photograph, and a sequence of eight delicate portraits — the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on tenderness, endurance, and the ethics of attention.
Organised with the support of Eastside Projects, Birmingham — an artist-led organisation that provided curatorial and logistical assistance in partnership with The Ukrainian Cultural Association in the UK — the exhibition is curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, whose practice bridges contemporary British minimalism with post-Soviet sensitivity.
Created between 2021 and 2022, these works span a temporal and emotional threshold: before and after the onset of war in Ukraine. Their stillness does not withdraw from history; rather, it opens a reflective space — an act of care in a time of fracture. Each work moves with the rhythm of its making, inviting the viewer to slow down and remain with what is fragile yet unyielding.
At the centre of the exhibition is Untitled (Face I) (2021), a drawing of remarkable restraint. A child’s face emerges through translucent layers of coloured pencil, its edges dissolving into air. The image hovers between presence and disappearance, revealing visibility itself as a fragile state. This work sets the moral tone for the exhibition: the belief that to look gently is to resist the violence of certainty.
The Trace (2022) extends this inquiry through a large C-type photograph of human skin marked by a faint red diagonal. Both intimate and monumental, the image captures what endures after pain — the quiet persistence of life within vulnerability. The photograph transforms the surface of the body into a site of tenderness, where light touches as intimately as the hand.
Completing the exhibition, Echoes (Eight Faces) (2022) gathers this vocabulary of fragility into rhythm. Eight near-identical portraits appear in subtle variations, each trembling between appearance and erasure. Their repetition produces not narrative but resonance — a visual pulse that mirrors the act of breathing.
Critic and writer John Berger described “the moment of seeing when meaning hesitates.” The Soft Edge of Being inhabits that hesitation — the space between the visible and the comprehensible. It also recalls Gillian Rose’s notion of “the broken middle”: the ethical distance between self and other where certainty fails but responsibility persists. Yushchenko’s practice inhabits this space fully. His faces, marks, and surfaces are not representations but invitations — to see with empathy, to dwell within uncertainty, to notice without possession.
The exhibition resonates with a British tradition of quiet radicalism. Artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Tacita Deanhave long pursued the politics of stillness — Whiteread through the casting of absence, Dean through the slow decay of light and film. Yushchenko’s work joins this lineage, translating it through the tenderness of post-war memory. His drawings and photographs do not seek consolation; they endure.
In a season marked by distance and uncertainty, The Soft Edge of Being reimagines fragility as strength. It reminds us that gentleness is not absence but action — that to look without conquest, and to perceive with care, remain among the most radical gestures available to us.
Atticus Arts Gallery, 11a Queen Street, Bath
