Universitetskaya lane, 17, Saint Petersburg, United States
Adja Yunkers began his artistic training at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1914
Lerchenfeld 2, 22081 Hamburg, United States
Adja Yunkers became a student at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 1920
1975
Y GANDHI, Paseo de la Reforma S/N, Bosque de Chapultepec I Secc, 11100 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 1975
1960
10 Art Museum Dr, Baltimore, MD 21218, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1960
1967
200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1967
1968
410 Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City in 1968
1960
10 Art Museum Dr, Baltimore, MD 21218, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1960
1967
200 Eastern Pkwy, Brooklyn, NY 11238, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum in 1967
1968
410 Campus Center Dr, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, United States
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City in 1968
1975
Y GANDHI, Paseo de la Reforma S/N, Bosque de Chapultepec I Secc, 11100 Ciudad de México, CDMX, Mexico
Adja Yunkers exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City in 1975
Universitetskaya lane, 17, Saint Petersburg, United States
Adja Yunkers began his artistic training at the Imperial Academy of Arts in 1914
Lerchenfeld 2, 22081 Hamburg, United States
Adja Yunkers became a student at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg in 1920
Dore Ashton, the second wife of Adja Yunkers
Octavio Paz
Adja Yunkers, born as Adolf Junkers, came to the world on July 15, 1900, in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire (currently in Latvia). He was a son of Karl Kaspar Yunkers and Adeline Friedrike Stahl.
Adja took interest in drawing at an early age, producing pictures from his fantasy and exploring the book illustrations.
Adja Yunkers began his artistic training at the age of fourteen when he entered the Imperial Academy of Arts in Petrograd (currently Saint Petersburg) and probably the Drawing School of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts. He spent one year at the institution.
In 1920, he became a student at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg where he studied art for a couple of years.
Adja Yunkers began his career from the military service at the Russian Army beginning at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1917.
After Yunkers left the country and in 1921 settled down in Hamburg, Germany where he had his first solo exhibition at the Maria Kunde Galerie. Later the same year, Adja Yunkers participated at the group show in Hannover along with such artists, as Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall and Vasily Kandinsky. He rented a studio with the money he earned from the exhibitions. While in Germany, Yunkers took an active part at artistic movements, joining the members of the Sturmgruppe, including Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Since 1923, Adja Yunkers had travelled around Europe and Latin America visiting Spain, the Canary Island, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Cuba where he spent one year from 1926. He then moved to Mexico where he met Diego Rivera. At the end of 1927, Yunkers came back to Europe settling down in Paris.
While in the capital of France, the artist worked on multiple artistic projects, like murals for the City Hall in Ivry or his woodcut series “The Ten Commandments”.
During 1936-1939, Adja Yunkers participated in the Spanish Civil War. After, he moved to Stockholm, Sweden.
The artist got acquainted with the Swedish Surrealists and exhibited widely. While in the country, he published and edited the periodicals on art and politics called Creation, Arts and Art portfolio. Since then, Yunkers devote much of his time to printmaking and soon became recognized for his graphic work. During the 1940s, he produced a great number of woodblock prints showing deformed objects and figures similar to German Expressionism in style.
The fire accident of 1947 destroying Yunkers’s studio with almost all of his artworks pushed the artist to relocate to New York City where he joined the teacher’s staff of the New School for Social Research working in the summers at the University of New Mexico. His popularity continued to grow and soon his artworks were acquired by several public and private collections. Two years after his arriving in America, Adja Yunkers formed the Rio Grande Workshop in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which issued a handmade art magazine titled ‘Prints in the Desert’.
In 1960, Yunkers produced his first lithographs including two series called ‘Salt’ of five lithographs and ‘Skies of Venice’ of ten lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles.
At the end of the decade, the artist worked on two commissioned projects, a mural for Syracuse University called a ‘Human Condition’ (1966) and a tapestry for Stony Brook University (1968). The same time, he collaborated with the poet Octavio Paz illustrating his book. Octavio became Yunkers’s and the following years, the artist illustrated many of his other writings.
Adja Yunkers exhibited a lot in the United States and in Europe, having the retrospectives at the Baltimore Museum of Art (1960), at the Brooklyn Museum (1967), at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City (1968), at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, Mexico (1975) and at the Fine Arts Museum of Long Island in Hempstead, New York (1983).
In addition to the above-mentioned teaching posts, Yunkers also worked as a visiting lecturer at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, and Columbia University.
Adja Yunkers was a prolific artist whose artworks are widely recognized. By his paintings, prints and lithographs, he contributed to the development of the Abstract Expressionism.
During his lifetime, Yunkers received the Bronze Medal from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Gold Medal of Norwegian International Print Biennale. Besides, he was a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.
The artist’s heritage is nowadays preserved in many well-known public collections around the world, including the National Library of France in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Pedro Coronel Museum in Mexico, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Victoria and Albert Museum in London and others.
In 2017, a painting by Yunkers titled ‘Bal Des Pendus V’ was purchased for $7,150 at an auction.
Miss Ever Ready
Rain on the Mesa - New Mexico
The Bird Lover
Requiem for a Virgin King
Composition in Black & Ochre
Summer Palace
Untitled
Plentitude in Blue
White on Blue II
Landscape
The Turtle
Embroidered Halo
Hommage to the First Monk Immolating Himself in Saigon
Passages of Soupias
Presaging in the Night (Homage to Rothko)
A II
Abstraction
Blind Man's White Collage
City Walkers
The King in Pink
Soprattutto IV
Untitled
Icon III
Figurer
No.14 untitled
Song of a Bird
A Moment into Eternity II
Blue and white II
Adja Yunkers was married twice.
His first wife became Kerstin Bergstrom on February 24, 1946. The couple had lived together till the early 1950s.
On July 8, 1952, Yunkers married one of his former students from the New School for Social Research, Dore Ashton. The family produced two daughters named Alexandra Louise and Marina.
