PAUL YANKO BIOGRAPHY
Since 2004 Youngstown, Ohio native Paul Yanko has been teaching in the Visual Arts Department at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. He received an M.F.A. in painting from Kent State University in 1995 and a B.F.A in illustration from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1991. While residing in Ohio, Yanko exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art and the McDonough Museum of Art. In 2002 he was the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
His work is included in private and public collections including the Cleveland Clinic, The Greenville County Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Carolina Collection at MUSC in Charleston, 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 defined boundaries.”
