Yulia Iosilzon was born of part Jewish heritage in Moscow, Russia in 1992. Identifying as a Russian-born Israeli artist, she immigrated to London, England to pursue her further art education. Iosilzon is known for her artworks that integrate abstraction with figuration and the real with the imaginary.
Contemporary artist Yulia Iosilzon was born to a Jewish-Israeli father and a Russian mother in Moscow, Russia in 1992 and identifies as a Russian-born Israeli artist. 'When she was 12, her father insisted on a boarding school in England. “A Catholic school was a strange experience,” she says. Religion was not a big part of the picture—her mother spent her childhood in atheistic Russia, and her father never pushed his beliefs onto her' (Spencer, 2020). She returned to Russia and them immigrated to London to pursue higher education in the arts against her father's wishes. She initially enrolled at Camberwell College of Art for a foundation course in Art and Design, after which she obtained her BA in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, from 2013 -17. She continued her post-graduate education at the Royal College of Art in London, where she studied for an MA in Fine Art from 2017 to 2019.
Iosilzon works in a variety of media, includes paintings of different scale on transparent silk, ceramics, and prints. These works often comment on social and political themes, as well as personal experiences. At times, she also integrates calligraphy and her paintings can take on the narrative quality of comic strips. They consistently feature human figures with minimal facial features, fruits, mushrooms and snake-like and frog-like creatures set against abstract compositions that suggest a forest setting. These figures recur across her work, as she establishes her own symbolism and iconography, while maintaining a uniformity where the figures are a focal point against dynamic, swirling backdrops. Her use of bright, bold colours and organic shapes, including circles and ovals, creates movement, while the colourful dots scattered throughout introduce a playful texture. Her combination of abstract and figurative imagery balances the real with the imagined. These paintings evoke Marc Chagall’s figurative dream-like scenes, while her whimsical abstraction calls to mind the early work of Wassily Kandinsky. Her ceramic pieces have an equally playful aesthetic and regularly feature cakes that look like a translation of children’s drawings into three dimensions. As such, these pieces mix traditional forms with contemporary aesthetics, as they echo the stylised and ornamental porcelain of the 18th century, while their cartoonish quality recalls Claes Oldenburg's soft sculptures. Iosilzon has stated: ‘My work is about the process rather than the final piece – the finished paintings are just frozen moments, or a glimpse into an imaginary world that I have in mind. The paintings are always based on the story like and move within their own scenes, which makes it easy to distinguish one series of work from another,’ (Bardawil, 2022, p. 66). Her inspiration comes variously from 1970s and 80s animation, Quentin Tarantino films, cartoons and fairy tales, while the works are rooted in her own experiences and emotions, where the integration of calligraphy binds everything together. Recently, she has also started exploring ideas of Jewish identity.
Iosilzon has exhibited in the UK and internationally. Her solo exhibition Heaven's Chambers held at Carvalho Park in New York in 2023 presented her fresh take on Jewish and biblical narratives, specifically Noah’s Ark. Abandoning traditional imagery, her paintings used Jewish symbols within a theme where there are no boats, animals or water, but rather abstracted fantastical spaces. Swirls and serpentine lines replaced water, while dots and flecks across the canvases suggested both destruction and new life. Works such as Trees and Fruit from Mount Sinai depicted barren landscapes turned lush, challenging conventional notions of Old testament narratives and identity. Iosilzon's Midrash-like approach continues the Jewish tradition of storytelling, infusing ancient texts with contemporary vitality and optimism. Another recent exhibition was the group show, Luminous Terrain which opened in the same year in the Atipografia gallery in Arzignano, Italy. This dreamlike work continues to straddle the boundary between the inner world and external reality, weaving emotions and memories into art, exploring themes of identity, memory, and the human condition, while Iosilzon's use of repeated symbols and metaphors fosters a sense of interpretive disorientation, blurring the lines between abstraction and figuration. Up close, her methodical layering of colour onto transparent fabric canvases reveals a complex, allegorical space inhabited by hybrid beings, devoid of ornamentation, yet rich in mythological resonance.
Iosilzon has received several awards and residencies. In 2016, while a student, she won the Audrey Wykeham Prize at the Slade and in 2019 she was a recipient of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries Award, which recognises emerging artists. Iosilzon also participated in a residency at The Fores Project in 2023, a platform for emerging artists located in Kentish Town, north London. Yulia Iosilzon lives and works in London. She is represented by London's Huxley-Parlour and Berntson Bhattacharjee galleries, both of which gave her solo shows in 2021. Her works are not held in any UK public collection.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Yulia Iosilzon]
Publications related to [Yulia Iosilzon] in the Ben Uri Library