PAUL YANKO BIOGRAPHY
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 Master 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. Entertainment District, 2001, was chosen to be featured in Google’s arts and culture online collection. 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, Charleston, SC, and Hampton III Gallery, 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 alternating between a cycle of successive applications of fluid mixtures and 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 the defined boundaries.”
