The Soft Edge of Being
By Lisa Knoll
11/11/2022
Exhibition Details:
Atticus Art Gallery, Bath
10 November – 23 December 2022
11a Queen Street, Bath, BA1 1HE, United Kingdom
Image © Atticus Gallery
Atticus Art Gallery presents The Soft Edge of Being, a quietly arresting exhibition of recent works by Volodymyr Yushchenko, on view until 23 December 2022. Bringing together three intimately connected bodies of work — a drawing from 2021, a large chromogenic photograph, and a sequence of eight fragile portraits — the exhibition unfolds as a meditation on tenderness, endurance, and the ethics of attention.
Organised with the support of Eastside Projects, Birmingham — an artist-led organisation that has provided curatorial and logistical assistance in partnership with The Ukrainian Cultural Association in the UK — the exhibition was curated by Sasha Burkhanova-Khabadze, whose curatorial practice bridges contemporary British minimalism with post-Soviet sensitivity.
Made between 2021 and 2022, these works span a temporal and emotional divide: before and after the onset of war in Ukraine. Their stillness does not retreat from history; rather, it opens a space for reflection — an act of care against fracture. Each work moves with the rhythm of its own making, inviting the viewer to slow down and remain with what is delicate yet unyielding.
The exhibition centres on Untitled (Face I) (2021), a drawing of remarkable restraint. A child’s face emerges through translucent layers of coloured pencil, its edges dissolving into air. The image hovers between presence and disappearance, as though visibility itself were a precarious condition. This drawing establishes the exhibition’s moral axis: the conviction that to look gently is to resist the violence of certainty.
The Trace (2022) expands this inquiry through a large C-type photograph of human skin marked by a faint red diagonal. Both intimate and monumental, the image captures what lingers after pain — the quiet persistence of life within vulnerability. The veins beneath the surface form a cartography of endurance; the red mark reads less as injury than as pulse. The photograph transforms the body’s surface into a site of tenderness, suggesting that light can touch as intimately as the hand.
Echoes (Eight Faces) (2022) gathers this vocabulary of fragility into rhythm. Eight near-identical portraits are set in subtle variations, each trembling between appearance and erasure. Their repetition produces not narrative but resonance — a pulse of perception. The work breathes slowly, deliberately, its fragility shared between viewer and image.
Critic and writer John Berger once spoke of “the moment of seeing when meaning hesitates.” The Soft Edge of Beinginhabits that hesitation — the interval between the visible and the comprehensible. The exhibition also recalls Gillian Rose’s notion of “the broken middle”: the ethical space between self and other where certainty fails but responsibility persists. Yushchenko’s practice lives within this fragile interval. His faces, marks, and surfaces are not representations but invitations — to see with empathy, to dwell within uncertainty, to notice without possession.
The exhibition resonates with a British tradition of quiet radicalism. Artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Tacita Dean have long pursued the politics of stillness — Whiteread through the casting of absence, Dean through the slow decay of light and film. Yushchenko’s work joins this lineage, translating it through the tenderness of post-war memory. His drawings and photographs do not seek consolation; they endure.
In a season marked by distance and uncertainty, The Soft Edge of Being reimagines fragility as strength. It reminds us that gentleness is not absence but action — that to look without conquest, and to perceive with care, remain among the most radical gestures available to us.