KARINA YACOUBIAN | Biography
Born in Uruguay · Lives and works in Belgium
Karina Yacoubian works at the point where gesture becomes matter and matter becomes language. Her wall reliefs, built from plaster, paper, mineral compounds and salvaged materials and worked in acrylic, oil and spray paint, are monochrome surfaces that seem to breathe: folds rise and recede, edges catch the light, and shadow becomes part of the structure of the work. White, in her hands, is not an absence but a field of light.
Trained in interior design at ORT University in Montevideo and in architecture at the University of Belgrano in Buenos Aires, she approaches each relief as a construction. As a painter, however, she is self-taught, and her practice grew out of intuition rather than doctrine. Her early canvases, large oils in saturated colour, drew on Abstract Expressionism, with colour and gesture held over an underlying geometric order. Over time the colour fell away, and the structure left the flat surface to occupy space. She has lived and worked in five countries across the Americas and Europe, and has been based in Belgium since 2020.
Since 2021 this has taken shape in Pure White, an ongoing series in which fragments of metal, plastic and cardboard are folded together with rice paper and Amalfi paper until they lose their original function and become pure texture. Its subjects are moons, oceans, cosmic explosions and living organisms, held between geometry and the organic, order and emotion. Pure White Reinvention, which followed, lets the human figure, nature and colour surface again from the same white ground.
The reliefs ask for a slower way of looking. Seen from the side, or at another hour of the day, the same work shows a different surface: the light completes it. In this attention to light and surface, Pure White enters into a quiet dialogue with the tradition of the white monochrome.
Trained in architecture, I approach each relief as a building: I construct the structure first, and I design it for the light it will receive.
I build from recovered matter. Fragments of metal, plastic and cardboard are folded with rice paper, Amalfi paper, plaster and mineral compounds until they lose their former use and become structure. White erases the history of each material and leaves volume, edge and hollow: the forms light needs in order to speak.
For me, light and architecture are a single language. Light does not illuminate the work; it tells it, and it tells it differently every hour. Each relief is completed by the light of the place that receives it, and by the time a viewer is willing to give it.
— Karina Yacoubian
Read the essay: Light as Architecture
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Solo
2026 · Pure White and Pure White Reinvention, Kasteel van Brasschaat
2026 · Pure White and The Core Series, Press Club Brussels Europe, Brussels
2019 · Origen, Kibon, Montevideo
Group
2025–2026 · Kunst Expo, Hasselt
2022 · Art3f Luxembourg, Luxexpo The Box, Luxembourg
2021 · Sacrifice, Milan and Fuerteventura
COLLECTIONS
Private collections in Belgium, Italy, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador and Uruguay
EDUCATION
Architecture, University of Belgrano, Buenos Aires
Interior Design, ORT University, Montevideo
