Kevin Umaña, Sanguine and Spiraling, 2023. Acrylic, oil, vinyl paint, flock, ink, sand, gouache, ceramics on canvas, 24 1/4 x 18 1/4 x 1 1/2 inches.
Yancey Richardson is proud to present Sanguine and Spiraling, an exhibition of work by Kevin Umaña, the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition brings together new and recent ‘hybrid paintings,’ Umaña’s combinations of glazed ceramics with painted canvas that explore psychology, nature and memory through the ever-changing lens of abstraction. Looking with equal attention at the collision of form in urban space and the inherent structure in organic matter, Umaña’s works oscillate between order and disorder, logic and impression, to express the constant state of flux and change found in nature. The exhibition will be on view in the project gallery from March 5 through April 11, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, March 5 from 6–8PM.
Kevin Umaña (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) is an artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Spending his early years between Los Angeles and El Salvador, Umaña’s personal history has profoundly shaped his visual language. In El Salvador, he was immersed in a rural environment rich with natural textures, vibrant flora and traditional crafts. While in Los Angeles, he confronted the intensity of city life and the pressures of assimilation. This duality seeded the fragmented forms and layered symbolism that define his art today. His practice continues to carry echoes of Latin American patterns, nature’s geometry and American architectural influences, all reimagined through abstraction. Umaña’s recent works, ‘hybrid paintings,’ combine glazed ceramics on painted canvas and fuse together conflicting styles—mess and order, biomorphic and geometric, thin and thick, matte and sheen.
Umaña developed his signature ‘hybrid paintings’ as a way of bypassing rigid distinctions between form, process and material, instead bringing them together in productive tension. Rooted in his time spent living in Los Angeles and now New York City, the ‘hybrid paintings’ are deeply personal expressions of Umaña’s experience of these two places, combining color with Rorschach-like patterns that echoes the vivid relationship each city has to architecture and the landscape. The fragmentation of space and form in his works speaks to the way memory often comes back in isolated parts, moments of the past shorn of their original feeling and context, only to be reassembled in the present. Umaña explores this psychological process, seeing his compositions as a way to suggest final coherence while keeping them fixed in a state of suspension.
Sanguine and Spiraling brings together work from recent series, such as Bird Stealing Bread and Moonglow Metanoia, with newly made works that see Umaña using kaleidoscopic patterns to suggest figuration without ever fixing them into place. Taking inspiration from his study of nature and its geometry of form, Umaña’s newest ‘hybrid paintings’ are built around dense, overlapping areas that, in their brilliance of color and intricacy of relationship, seem like worlds unto themselves. More specifically, Umaña’s work evokes patterns used by ancient civilizations the world over, and for the artist, references spiritual evolution and the cyclical nature of life. The contrasting textures of ceramic glaze, oils and acrylics heighten the sense of difference between them while complicating the illusion of space the works suggest. By fracturing the composition of each work and then reconstituting it into a stable yet evolving structure, Umaña captures the way our relationship to what surrounds us is constantly remade anew.
Umaña received his BFA from San Francisco State University in 2014. In 2025, Umaña was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. He has completed residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation (2024); Anderson Ranch (2024); Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2023-24); Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, Helena, MT (2023); The Center for Book Arts, New York (2019); Plop Residency, London, England (2018); and SIM Residency, Reykjavik, Iceland (2018). In 2017, Umaña created a permanent installation at The United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Institutions owning his work include The United Nations Art Collection, New York; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Munson, Utica, NY; Fidelity Mutual Funds Collection; Center for Book Arts Library, New York; and The Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. In 2026, Umaña will be participating in the MacDowell Fellowship in New Hampshire.
