About the Artist: Paul Yanko

  Born in Youngstown, Ohio in 1968, Paul Yanko completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1991 and continued his studies to receive a Masters of Fine Arts in painting from Kent State University in 1995. While residing in Northeastern, Ohio, Yanko exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art and the McDonough Museum of Art, Youngstown OH. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant. In 2011 he received a Surdna Foundation Fellowship, which was applied toward travel to the Northern Territory of Australia to research Indigenous art practices.
In 2004 he moved to Greenville, South Carolina with his wife, painter Enid Williams to teach full time in the Visual Arts Department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. Yanko continues to exhibit both regionally and nationally and his work is included in private and public collections including: The Johnson Collection, Spartanburg SC, the Greenville County Museum of Art, the Contemporary Carolina Collection at MUSC in Charleston, SC and the Akron Art Museum, Akron OH. He is represented by The George Gallery in Charleston SC, and Hampton III Gallery in Greenville, SC.
Since 2002, his work has focused on developing a response to abstraction that addresses nuances of color and surface along with the representation of flat and illusionistic space. In a recent statement he describes his work as “an ongoing exploration in the development of disparate and complex surface qualities reconciled through various means of paint application. I develop imagery by applying successive applications of paint mixtures of varying consistencies, along with the use of masking to create more sharply defined profiles. Through intensive layering I can construct, obscure, and embed elements within a loosely grid based matrix. I am at once supporting a fixed alignment with the grid and subverting it by allowing elements to move beyond defined boundaries.”