U.S. artist Yvonne Petkus uses her process-based paintings to explore ideas of struggle, vulnerability and strength, and the forces of nature against the body (sometimes all found in a single gesture, like a dash or a run). Using visual cues over direct representation, her work is about what we carry and hold just under the skin, expressed as fragments, accumulations, and glimpses. Each piece is found through a directed struggle, formed and broken, and formed again, by mark-making as a living action and through painting as a physical act of thinking. Each piece is about, acts as, a meditation, a grasping – a search for meaning.

Petkus, a professor at Western Kentucky University, presents her work in an ongoing schedule of national and international exhibitions, conferences, and lectures, and is represented by the Moremen Gallery in Louisville, Kentucky.