CATALOGUE ESSAY by ANDREW HARPER 2026
“One measures a circle, beginning anywhere” – Charles Fort, Lo! 1931
In 1717, Sir Isaac Newton purchased The Maypole in The Strand, which was decaying. It was the most significant maypole in London; each May, it would be festooned with blooms, and the ancient dance, a ritual whose pagan origins are lost, would be performed; hundreds took part. Newtown sent the remnants to Wanstead Park, the stone pillar became the base for the second, and largest, telescope in Europe. The old and the new merged; this is a fulcrum of history, a deliberately constructed analogous engine. Sir Isaac Newton did this with purpose, and it seems fitting; before he established the foundations of science, he studied and wrote on alchemy. His place in history is complex; he is both magician and scientist, embodying both and suggests that there is a relationship, rather than an opposition.
Yehonatan Koening is a rare artist whose work occupies a similar territory to the one Newton sketched out. He mixes older and newer approaches techniques and ideas in his exploratory, curious art; he draws slowly, entering into meditative states that are manifestations of personal ritual; he works with a printing press, with precious inks, then generates form with code, shifting again to use needle and thread. These varied techniques and skills become a palette. The drawings exist as material objects, inscribed with silent undercurrents of philosophy. Yehonatan actively moves with the tension of creative impulse and desire to experience what a work might become; the act of making informs the final image, explored and reached for with discipline and intimate knowledge.
The materiality of each work is crucial: Yehonatan is intimate with the paper, the varied processes, the substances and methods used to make marks, and their links and echoing parallels: he understands what each element can do, how it functions, even its mythology. Using code to make a segment of an image is linked by history to the use of thread; the earliest computers had their links to the mechanical looms of the industrial age. Method and medium become the work, shaped by the artist who creates in sympathy to a chaotic process where there are no accidents: where mark-making, an essential statement of being, is a tool for the exploration of esoteric, abstract spaces.
Yehonatan’s work is expansive, sublime and concrete: its contradictions spread out to the edges of pure abstraction, while never losing the meaning Yehonatan infuses into all his complex, elegant work.
Artist Statement
This body of work explores the drama of the ineffable, a search for ecstatic revelation through an awareness of knowing and not knowing. For me, art is philosophy by other means: aesthetics as a way to produce embodied, ecstatic knowledge.Working with ink, thread, code, printmaking, and light, I stage theaters for being and dissolution, fleeting architectures that tease revelation. Each piece is built on polarities in dynamic momentum: dark and light, contraction and expansion, coherence and incoherence - Mark making suggesting both mathematics and nature, murmurs, hives, shifting terrains, constellations, arborescence, raw life.The process moves material through states: ink becomes light, light becomes code, code becomes matter. Each transformation is both formation and erasure.An art of the complex in service to simplicity. What Blake called “fearful symmetry” hovers here: the fragile balance between precision and surrender -These works are not to be explained but encountered - fleeting architectures that gesture toward the ineffable.
Process
Photopolymer photogravure is a contemporary version of the traditional intaglio printing method once used by artists like Stieglitz and Steichen. Rather than working with copper plates and acid, I use photosensitive polymer plates that are exposed with UV light and developed in water -a safer, more sustainable approach.Original works on paper (ink or graphite) are scanned or photographed, then printed directly onto these plates. Once exposed and developed, they’re run through an etching press by hand, producing richly tactile prints with the depth and texture of traditional gravure.In some of my newer works, I skip the plate-making altogether - using scanned drawings to generate digital code for real time rendering, manipulating the image in virtual time and space, and then printing it again. The final surface is reworked by hand with analog materials—raw pigment, wax, thread, ink, etc... Bringing it full circle back into the analog.
Artist Profile
Yehonatan Koenig is an American artist living and working in Melbourne. Since relocating to Australia, Koenig has exhibited at Spring 1883 with Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art and participated in the live collaborative event BloodRiverRootTree at The Seafarers Mission, Norla Dome (2025). Internationally, his work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Graz, and New York, gaining recognition for its synthesis of material precision and metaphysical inquiry.
Koenig studied fine art in New York, completing a BFA at the School of Visual Arts and an MFA at Hunter College. His formative years were influenced by the theoretical writings of Rosalind Krauss and Donald Kuspit, whose perspectives on deconstruction and psychoanalytic humanism continue to inform his practice.
Prior to returning to the studio full-time, Koenig spent over two decades working in creative technology, immersive media, and production, founding several companies and collaborating with major international studios. Awarded Australia’s Global Talent Visa for digital innovation, his interdisciplinary background continues to shape an art practice grounded in process, perception, and philosophical inquiry.
Koenig’s work has been recognised through a number of international awards and prizes, including honours from the Luxembourg Art Prize, the Chelsea International Fine Art Competition, and the Scan.Art Emerging Artist Prize. His works are held in private collections in Australia, the United States, and Europe.
