David Yaghjian at if Art Gallery

For Scenes, Columbia, S.C., artist David Yaghjian’s upcoming solo exhibition at if ART Gallery, the artist will make a scene right there in the Columbia gallery. The scene will combine new paintings, monotypes and sculptures with an installation element made from cardboard figures and objects, literally creating the kind of scene or set often depicted in Yaghjian’s paintings.

The exhibition will run September 25 – October 17, with an opening reception on Friday, September 25, 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. Yaghjian will present a gallery talk on Saturday, October 10, 2:00 p.m. if ART Gallery will produce a catalogue for the exhibition.

“The addition of an installation element that literally presents a scene in the theater-stage sense seems appropriate,” if ART owner Wim Roefs said. “In his paintings, Yaghian increasingly has created ambiguous environments that sort of hover between a real-looking situations and a theater stage, where certain elements such as trees, animals, moons and even the figure have evolved from being presented in representational fashion to being shown as mere props. Now the show itself will have a similar ambiguity.”

Columbia native Yaghjian, who was born in 1948, is a mainstay on the city’s art scene and among the most original contemporary painters in the Carolinas. He was selected for the 701 Center for Contemporary Art South Carolina Biennial 2013 and 2015. Yaghjian was featured in the 2012 book 100 Southern Artists. The exhibition catalogue David Yaghjian: Everyman Turns Six accompanied a major 2011 solo exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia, organized by if ART Gallery, which also presented his 2009 show Dancing Man.

In 2012, the Columbia native was included in Faces of Figureworks: Self Portraits at Figureworks gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y., an exhibition that included Byron Browne, Philip Evergood, Red Grooms, Chaim Gross, Jack Levine and Raphael and Moses Soyer. He was among six artists in the 2007 Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art exhibition Studio Visits. That year’s David & Edmund Yaghjian, which included his late father’s work, was at if ART Gallery.

Yaghjian has shown extensively throughout the Southeast, including at Blue Spiral I in Asheville, N.C.; the Florence (S.C.) Museum of Art; the S.C. State Museum and McKissick Museum in Columbia; and the Spruill Center Gallery in Atlanta. In Atlanta he also has painted several murals.

Yaghjian holds a BA from Massachusetts’ Amherst College and studied in New York City at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Art. Among his instructors were Fairfield Porter, Leonard Baskin, Will Barnett and Chaim Koppelman.