Self-taught visionary artist Yvette Endrijautzki was born Wuppertal, Germany in 1974, immigrated to the United States in 2006, and returned to Germany in 2017. In 2009, she established The Nautilus Studio in Seattle's culturally burgeoning Georgetown neighborhood. Nautilus was a work of art itself, with decor suggesting an underwater space. Located in a neighborhood full of artist's studios, Nautilus displayed both Yvette's own works and those of numerous other Georgetown artists, both established and emerging. The gallery was featured in design magazine Houzz in 2012, 🔗 and won an award for Yvette's resourcefully sophisticated interior design.
Besides her own artwork and gallery, Yvette curated shows by local and international artists at a variety of Seattle venues, most notably Cloud Gallery, KrabJabStudio, and the mobile Enlightenment Cabinet, and taught assemblage workshops at the prestigious Gage Academy in 2010 and 2011. By her own description, her curated exhibitions "often go against the grain of cultural trends, celebrating variety, the odd and bizarre, antiquity, the macabre, and a multitude of philosophies, challenging the viewer to consider new perspectives."
Probably best known for sculpture, assemblages, and metalsmithed jewelry, Yvette has created props and scenery for stage and screen, most notably a miniature temple for the 2016 puppet film Yamasong, produced by Sam Koji Hale and Heather Henson. Her stage work experience began with an apprenticeship in 1988 at the Opera in her native Wuppertal, where the great choreographer Pina Bausch was art director. Still in Germany, Yvette won several regional and national awards for her participation in claymation and short films, and from 2005 to 2007, was costume and prop maker for the world-renowned Pyro-tech Theater "Theater Titanick" in Leipzig and Muenster. She also trained in dance and gymnastics, and apprenticed both in typography and sign-making, and in bookbinding and the arts of papier-mâchè.
Yvette's further skills as a dancer and acrobat are rooted in the very disciplined background of a decade of professional training in Rhythmic Sport Gymnastics, where she competed in the junior national team in 1986. From 1998 to 2001 she lived in the French Alps and the Pyrenees as a member of two alternative music and performance bands "Anima" and "Tromatism" as a fire performer, juggler and singer, working with former members of the legendary French punk band Bérurier Noir.
In the late 2010s, Yvette designed the Farrago Spiritum Tarot, based on the body of acquired knowledge of American astrologer Raven Bella Zingaro.
Yvette returned to her native Wuppertal in 2017 and soon reestablished The Nautilus Studio there, featuring an increasingly international array of artists.
We are almost unspeakably happy to have her as a collaborator on the visual aspects of our project.
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Yvette Endrijautzki in front of her gallery in Wuppertal, 2021.
(Credit: Jana Turek. All rights reserved, used here by permission of Yvette Endrijautzki.)