Yulia Iosilzon: Entangled Pluralism

Ceramic is a time-bearing medium. Whether a vessel is from twenty thousand years ago or the twenty-first century, it has the feel of a relic, a charged fragment of its age, evocative of all the experience it made possible and bore witness to. Perhaps ceramic has this distinctive historical aura — more obvious and intricate than painting — because of its versatility as a medium. These objects were treasured for their beauty, but they also had practical uses as containers for food and drink. In ancient times, they were surfaces for poetry and storytelling, suffused with the excitement and pleasure of those narratives. Ceramics were for nourishment and intoxication; they provoked and circulated emotion.

All these histories and meanings can be felt in Yulia Iosilzon’s new suite of ceramic paintings. Across these works, Iosilzon exploits the tension between the hardness of ceramic and the fluidity of the world she paints onto it. Faintly smiling faces of spectral human figures, sinuous green shapes suggestive of foliage, dots and dashes that might be pollen or algae, airborne or underwater: all these forms appear to float. This fantastical realm, which interweaves biblical and mythological imagery with flashes of magic and the supernatural, presided over by a feeling of transformation and possibility, is one which Iosilzon has developed across her body of work. But the specific method demanded by painting onto ceramic has been a more recent and invigorating development. Iosilzon sketches the painting in a notebook and proposes a colour scheme. The drawing is then divided into parts that will become the ceramic pieces that comprise the painting. The original image is undone and remade, a possible metaphor for becoming, the open-ended transformations of humans, animals and their environments towards which so much of Iosilzon’s practice is turned.

Experiment abounds in the kiln. Glazes are fired at deliberately wrong temperatures, layered with different densities, and the results are uncanny textures and strange chromatic admixtures. There is an element of surrender in the kiln, and like the soak-stain technique of Helen Frankenthaler — an important touchstone for Iosilzon — there is an openness to risk and its unexpected rewards. Pigment has a three-dimensional quality: it swells and cracks; it bubbles over into a scrim of perforations. Associations with plants, animals and meteorological effects swirl through these colours: there is tough, scaled skin and downy pelt; moss and mould; roiling mud and thick wedges of ice. These ceramic parts are then carefully assembled into a structure that echoes the composition’s visual organising principles, its sensuous curves and looping motion, instead of tracing its forms exactly. Iosilzon’s process is energised by this balance between the unpredictability of glaze experimentation and the necessary precision of the paintings’ architecture.

Rebecca Birrell is an art historian, writer and curator. Her novel, Venus, Vanishing, will be published by Picador in the UK in July 2026 and Henry Holt in the US in October 2026. Her first book, This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early 20th Century was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. A Guardian/Observer Art Book of the Year 2021, it was described as ‘a striking act of collective empathy.’

Text © Rebecca Birrell 

All works © Yulia Iosilzon