Total fragmentation is Yulia Bas’s signature style and above all a paradigmatic principle, an existential impulse of her artistic practice. The artist explores how, in the conditions of today’s state of perpetual flux and splitting of information, we are forced to update and reform attempts to gain subjective integrity of identity. As a result of personal experience of moving from Eastern to Western Europe, artist’s own awareness of self turned into an unsolvable paradox: identity that exists on the border of different cultures. She is no longer Russian as she inhabits the gap between East and West, between the past and the future, the territory of the absence of binary oppositions and hierarchies. Memories, plans, desires – everything acquires its own appearance, and nothing fits into a single coordinate system. However, the fragmentation of being in Bas’ oeuvre lets go of its negative connotation and becomes a poetic and pensive reflection on a possibility for new consolidation and fundamental openness to regrowth. The canvas assumes a continuous formation, renewal and constant reassembly. To start this process, it is necessary to interrupt the automatism of disjunctive-conjunctive synthesis. In order to achieve this, Yulia Bas breaks the machinery of the portrait, restarts it, and allows the image of a person to oscillate, to remain in form, and in a state of transition.

In the beginning was the body – its pain, its struggle, its accumulation of past experience, and that of generations long gone. Yulia Bas understands this suffering as the starting point for an artistic study of her own psychological reality, of contemporary life, and beyond that, of the unwritten, universal history of womankind. She depicts the bodies of her subjects and uses her own as a philosophical instrument; thus, she creates a space for every viewer to explore the same topics within themselves.
Yulia tells this narrative in monumental portraits, in which inner conflicts are an expression of beauty, an integral part of existence, and both a proof and a celebration of the life energy coursing within us. That struggle also harbours the seed of healing and transformation – a turbulent combat that ultimately leads to reunification and fulfilment – achieved at considerable cost.
Born amid the dying embers of Soviet Russia, Yulia’s early years were set against a backdrop of constant transformation, as entire countries unravelled and reformed. Her work also thus sets out to excavate the social biases buried in our deepest subconscious memories – an inheritance from our ancestors, with their triple burden of tradition, patriarchy, and culture. Moving to Europe helped her question and reshape the world-view she had grown up with and informs her artistic practice in Barcelona to this day – a blend of perspectives: neither fully “other” nor fully “Western”.
Such a voyage into terra incognita calls for unorthodox materials: cork, paper, sand, mixed acrylic media, fabrics, and even the pages of her private diary. The multi-faceted textures that emerge under the layer of paint represent the intricate unpredictability and uniqueness of our individual story, with its blend of experiences and stereotypes.
Unlike the mind, with its vanities, arrogance, and endless search to justify its existence, Yulia sees the body as speaking a primary truth. Her future work will continue to explore the dichotomy between mind and body – the eternally tortured dialogue that lies at the very core of human experience.

Fairs

2022 December Art Miami / Galerie LeRoyer booth AM510

2021 ​December Art Miami / Galerie LeRoyer booth AM107

Solo Shows

2023 October UPCOMING Solo show with Art LeadHer in Malibu

2023 February Art LeadHer gallery + Urban Zen NY / New York, USA / Solo show “Am, I, Enough”

2022 November Benjamin Eck gallery / Munich, Germany / Duo show with Kyle Barnes

2022 May Galerie 


LeRoyer / Montreal, Canada / Solo show “Piece of mind”

2022 February Gillian Jason Gallery / London, UK / Solo show “Fragments of self”

2020 February Galerie LeRoyer / Montreal, Canada / Focus exhibition

September 2019 JLS gallery / Mexico City, Mexico / Solo show “Portraits of imperfection”

Group Shows

2023 July Impulse Gallery / Lucerne, Switzerland / Three artists show “Fragments: from the origin to the body”

2023 March-April Art LeadHer at CHRISTIE’S / London / Group show “Note To Self”

2021 July Art LeadHer at Show Gallery / Los Angeles, USA / Group show

2021 April Art LeadHer Gallery + Urban Zen NY / New York, USA / Group show “Truth about me”

2020 September ArtLife fest 2020 / Moscow, Russia / Art Festival

2020 July Gillian Jason Gallery / London, UK / group on-line show “What We See”

2020 February Galerie LeRoyer / Montreal, Canada / Focus exhibition Yulia Bas

2019 September ArtLife fest 2019 / Moscow, Russia / Group show and speaker

2019 April COX gallery / Bordeaux, France / Group show “Portrait de Femme”

2019 March Art LeadHer Gallery with Urban Zen / New York, USA / Group show “King

Woman”
2018 August CAGE Contemporary Art Gallery / Barcelona, Spain / Group show