Yulia Hap was born in 1998 in Wrocław, Poland. Her paintings take place at an imagined midnight; a point where time no longer advances cleanly, but gathers, thickens and begins to strain.
This world is held in a suspended breath, where continuity falters and familiar systems atrophy. Matter renders itself uncertain, cognition thaws.
Within this theme, technological forms persist beyond their own fragility, sustained by the belief of future hands rather than function. Bodies enter unfamiliar proximities with other orders of life, while boundaries between species soften.
Unquiet pressure marks the unravelling in these fields, not the moment of collapse itself. Underway is a mass taxidermy of what once appeared immutable - tempos of land, ocean, sky - all pointing toward some end.
Hap constructs these moments of instability through accumulation and removal, a collage in paint, drawing from historical images, film stills, digital culture and her emotional landscape. Working instinctively, she fragments these sources to trace a nonverbal logic through the process of painting. Many of Hap’s textures are created with grattage. She finds that these reductions and imprints echo moments of midnight themselves - faint omens of rupture etched into the fraying subjects and sickly textures.
