Artist Statement
Nadia Younes’s work navigates transitional spaces and material tensions, challenging physical and conceptual boundaries. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and video, she engages industrial materials like resin, pewter, insulation, and salvaged metal—substances that shift states, resist control, and reflect histories of labor and neglect.
Processes of crushing, melting, casting, and reconfiguring are central to her practice. Younes is drawn to materials that exist between solid and liquid conditions, rigid and pliable. These are used to examine the fragility of structures often taken for granted. Her paintings investigate construction sites, fencing, and infrastructural fragments. Some employ trompe l’oeil techniques to destabilize the familiar; others lean into surface disruption, rejecting recognizable form. In her sculptural work, paint skins are stretched, metal conduits knotted, and collapsed vessels cast, forming unstable architectures that lean toward failure.
Having grown up between Israel, Mali, Mauritania, Jordan, and Russia, Younes developed a sharp sensitivity to instability: the sense that environments, like bodies, are held together just enough to function, but always verge on collapse. Her work reflects this condition, asking what happens when form, perception, and meaning slip away from certainty.
Younes treats making as a physical mode of thinking, a way to translate contradiction into spatial experience. Her practice is driven by what materials reveal when they no longer behave, and by how spaces of suspension, friction, and breakdown can open up new ways of seeing.
Bio:
Nadia Younes is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, installation, and video. Born in Nazareth to a Palestinian refugee father and a former Soviet Union immigrant mother, she grew up moving between Israel, Mali, Mauritania, Jordan, and Russia.
Her practice explores material instability, translation, and the spaces between structure and collapse. She works with materials that shift, stretch, or resist control, examining how physical forms mirror histories of displacement and tension.
Fluent in English, Hebrew, Russian, and Arabic, she approaches materials much like she approaches language: as systems that can be bent, fractured, and reconfigured to reveal new meaning.
Younes recently completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art (2025) and holds a BFA from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, with additional training from the Saint Petersburg Art and Industry Academy and the Muzot School of Arts in Tel Aviv-Jaffa.
CV
Nadia-Younes.com
Nadia.younes@yale.edu