YVETTA FEDOROVA | What’s Left Of Her

Fedorova’s work strives to stimulate the imagination and produce an emotional resonance in the audience with dynamic lines, movement and congested or open spaces.

What does love look like inside the brain? What does anger look like? How about madness? Pure joy? Vengeance? All these thoughts and emotions are essentially what makes us who we are yet they are invisible. How do our ideas, memories, and feelings travel along the networks of our minds? These are some of the questions Yvetta Federova asks herself when she cuts her abstract portraits using X-Acto blades and black Fedrigoni, masterly crafted Italian paper.

Fedorova believes cutting paper is like composing music one can see. She takes inspiration from the movement of the human body and contemporary music, where sound naturally translates into line and shape. Federova strives to stimulate the imagination and produce an emotional resonance in her audience with dynamic lines and movement.

Yvetta Fedorova is a New York City-based artist and illustrator. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, she graduated from The Drama School of Theater and Film in 1990. In 1991 she immigrated to the USA. Fedorova completed her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1997. Her award-winning illustration work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators, American Illustration, and The Society of Publication Designers. Her illustrations have regularly appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times (for many years, Fedorova illustrated Jane Brody’s weekly column), The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and many other popular magazines and newspapers. Fedorova regularly worked as a graphic journalist for Internationale Magazine, based in Rome. She recently created illustrations for an interactive exhibit at The Museum of Native Americans. Her graphic series, Karina and Me, appeared in the op-ed section of The New York Times and many other worldwide publications. In 2014 Fedorova founded “Collective Art Lessons,” a program for pre-teens and teens. The successful program took place for five years in museums across New York.

In the last two years, Fedorova has taken a drastically new direction and fully committed herself to developing large abstract cutouts. During the pandemic, Fedorova created an extensive portfolio of new pieces.