Yakovleva – Aphrodite‘s Beach, 2025
The Art Walk
Aphrodite‘s Beach, 2025
„Of course, there are good times and bad times. But we stick together and get through it together."
EDUCATION
College of Fine Arts, Athens
Grants, awards, recognition
Body in Strike Gallery Robert Grunenberg, Berlin
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A Closer Look at the Work
Aphrodite’s Beach It is a large-scale cut-out on film that can Union-Gelände be seen as a window installation. Yakovleva does not cut her motifs from white paper — she works with black film on a bright background. The light that falls through the windows brings the work to life: depending on the time of day and the weather, the intensity with which the turquoise radiates through the cut-out areas changes.
The image itself is dense: sea creatures, plants, bodies — all woven into a lush, almost ornamental pictorial space. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and desire, emerged from the sea. She stands for beauty as power, for female self-empowerment, for the sensual as a political gesture. Yakovleva translates this mythology into her own visual language: direct, popfeminist, without apology.
A window that is no longer transparent — but tells a story.
About the Artist
Sonja Yakovleva (*1989 in Potsdam) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. Raised in St. Petersburg, she studied at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach and the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in Athens. Frankfurt — the city from which she thought she would eventually grow tired — has become her home. It is here that she has built her own infrastructure, and it is here that her works are created.
Yakovleva is known for her monumental cutouts: large-scale, space-consuming panoramas that negotiate female power, corporeality, and social power structures with pop-feminist sharpness and irony. She draws her motifs — bodies, animals, political symbols — from everyday life, from social media, from stock photo archives. She combines the craftsmanship and folk lore of cutting with explicitly contemporary, often provocative content. In 2024, she is presenting her largest institutional solo exhibition to date at the Frankfurter Kunstverein.
Photos: © Marie Ruck
Ardi Goldman Kunst-
und Kulturstiftung gGmbH
Uniongelände
Hanauer Landstraße 188, 60314 Frankfurt am Main