Kutlesa is pleased to announce Oblivion Blues, an exhibition of new works by Oakland‑based artist Yulia Pinkusevich at the gallery’s New York location, marking the artist’s first solo show with the gallery since she joined. Bringing together a series of large scale works, the exhibition explores the unstable territory between abstraction and information, memory and measurement, and the systems developed to record catastrophe and the lived experience of those who endure it.

Pinkusevich’s paintings originate in the isorithm, a geometric method developed in the context of civil defense to map the effects of an explosive event across inhabited terrain. Designed to render destruction measurable, these diagrams translate an otherwise immeasurable event into lines, distances, and concentric fields. The maps were created through Geographic Information System (GIS) in collaboration with Northeastern University’s Professor of Public Policy Mark Henderson, translating population and geographical data as well as contemporary global conflict into precise spatial structures. In Oblivion Blues, Pinkusevich takes this rational language as a point of departure, transforming it through the physical processes of drawing and painting into expansive and highly charged compositions.

The exhibition also incorporates a series of historic wallpaper images drawn from archival material documenting declassified CIA reconnaissance missions and aerial bombing campaigns from the 1940s and subsequent decades. Pinkusevich encountered these images during her research as a Fellow at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where archival records of aerial surveillance and military operations became part of her investigation into the ways technology has transformed violence into images, information, and systems of observation.

The source of this inquiry is both historical and personal. Born in Kharkiv and raised during the late Soviet period, Pinkusevich grew up amid civil-defense exercises, fallout shelters, and the persistent awareness of potential catastrophe. Shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, her family immigrated to New York. During the journey, she recalls witnessing the deep grooves of military tanks impressed into the asphalt-an image that has remained with her as a formative encounter with the way political events become inscribed into landscape and memory.