Carrie Yamaoka is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture. She engages with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. Her work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation. Her material engagement and rule-breaking strategies embrace accidents and dissolve binaries, such as improvisation/intention, methodology/intuition, and surface/depth. Toggling between visibility and invisibility, overlaying legibility and illegibility, breaking apart and recomposing, Yamaoka’s work is in a constant state of mutation.

Yamaoka (b.1957, Glen Cove, NY) lives and works in New York City. Her work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Participant Inc. (New York), Grey Art Museum (New York), and MassMOCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Writing on her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula, and BOMB. Her work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Sunpride Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of the 2025 Maria Lassnig Prize, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). A monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, was published by Radius Books in 2025. Her work is included in the main exhibition In Minor Keys curated by Koyo Kouoh at the 61st Venice Biennale opening in early May 2026.