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if ARTwalk: Salon I & II: December 11- 24, 2008

For exhibition installation images, click here.

THE SALON I & II

Dec. 11 – 24, 2008

an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations:

Gallery 80808/Vista Studios

808 Lady Street

&

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln Street

Reception and ifART Walk: Thursday, Dec. 11, 5 – 10 p.m.

at and between both locations

Opening Hours:

Weekdays, 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.

Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sunday, 1 – 5 p.m.

& by appointment

Open Christmas Eve until 7 p.m.

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART:

(803) 255-0068/ (803) 238-2351 – if-art-gallery@sc.twcbc.com

For its December 2008 exhibition, if ART Gallery presents The Salon I & II, an exhibition at two Columbia, SC, locations: if ART Gallery and Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. On Thursday, December 11, 2008, 5 – 10 p.m., if ART will hold opening receptions at both locations. The ifART Walk will be on Lady and Lincoln Streets, between both locations, which are around the corner from each other.

The exhibitions will present art by if ART Gallery artists, installed salon-style at both Gallery 80808 and if ART. Artists in the exhibitions include two new additions to if ART Gallery, Columbia ceramic artist Renee Rouillier and the prominent African-American collage and mixed-media artist Sam Middleton, an 81-year-old expatriate who has lived in the Netherlands since the early 1960s.

Other artists in the exhibition include Karel Appel, Aaron Baldwin, Jeri Burdick, Carl Blair, Lynn Chadwick, Steven Chapp, Stephen Chesley, Corneille, Jeff Donovan, Jacques Doucet, Phil Garrett, Herbert Gentry, Tonya Gregg, Jerry Harris, Bill Jackson, Sjaak Korsten, Peter Lenzo, Sam Middleton, Eric Miller, Dorothy Netherland, Marcelo Novo, Matt Overend, Anna Redwine, Paul Reed, Edward Rice, Silvia Rudolf, Kees Salentijn, Laura Spong, Tom Stanley, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Leo Twiggs, Bram van Velde, Katie Walker, Mike Williams, David Yaghjian, Paul Yanko and Don Zurlo.

Works of Art: Edmund Yaghjian

Woman's Portrait, 1940s, pencil on paper, 8 3/4 x 10 3/4 in.
$1,800

Untitled, 1945, oil on canvas, 25 x 30 in., $4,500

Tugboats, 1930s, pencil on paper, 7 x 8 1/2 in., $800

Untitled, 1960s,
oil on canvas mounted on board,
20 x 16 in.$5,000

Biography: Edmund Yaghjian

Tugboats, 1930s

Pencil on paper

7 x 8 1/2 in

$800

Edmund Yaghjian (1905 – 1997)

Armenian native and long-time Columbia, S.C., resident Edmund Yaghjian is one of the important art figures in South Carolina since World War II. During 27 years at the University of South Carolina art department, which he chaired for two decades, Yaghjian taught many of the state’s prominent artists. He was instrumental in establishing the Columbia Museum of Art and several local and statewide arts organizations. Before coming to Columbia in 1945, Yaghjian had already established himself as an up-and-coming artist on the New York scene with a growing national reputation. Among the institutions that showed or have his work are the Art Students League, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, Kraushaar Gallery, the Whitney Museum, all in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C, the Rhode Island School of Design, the High Museum in Atlanta and the Birmingham (Ala.) Museum of Art. In 2007, the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia organized a Yaghjian retrospective that also traveled to ACA Galleries in New York City.

Essay: Edmund Yaghjian

Sparta Crossing (NY), 1940s

Pencil on paper

5 3/4 x 8 in

$800

EDMUND YAGHJIAN by Wim Roefs 

[catalogue text for the exhibition "David & Edmund Yaghjian" at if ART Gallery, April - May, 2007]

It’s no surprise that the late Edmund Yaghjin spent a lot of time in his studio – or at least tried to. Yaghjian clearly enjoyed painting and drawing. Visiting the artist’s retrospective at the South Carolina State Museum in Columbia, it’s easy to sense the joy Yaghjian must have experienced painting his surroundings – the big-city and small-town environments he was part of and the people living and working there. In his paintings, even buildings and objects seem alive.

Yaghjian was unencumbered by prevailing artistic trends, which no doubt sustained his joy in painting. His 1930s work put him in the mainstream of American modernism, including the Ashcan School and other forms of social realism. But Yaghjian remained committed to depicting daily life even as the winds of modernism changed after World War II toward Abstract Expression and subsequent modes of non-representative art. 

Yaghjian would only turn to non-objective painting late and briefly. He probably didn’t do so because he felt the need to follow fashion. He might have done so for the same reasons he went back and forth between representational styles and approaches during his career: because he could, because he thought it would be interesting and because he thought he might enjoy the attempt. A person should “do the work he wants to do,” Yaghjian told an interviewer in the early 1970s. “The most important thing is not to be bored.”

In addition to a large body of paintings, Yaghjian produced numerous watercolors, drawings and studies. Twenty of those and a lithograph in the current show at if ART Gallery span four decades of his career. They include 1930s work, among them New York City scenes of Central Park and the Hudson River, including a study of tugboats, all reminiscent of work in the retrospective.

The 1940s are represented by scenes from New York state outside of the city. They include views of Sparta and Ossining, N.Y. Ossining, just north of the city, was the subject of a series of works well represented in the retrospective. 

By the 1950s, Yaghjian had moved to Columbia to head the University of South Carolina art department. Watercolors such Wheat Street and Street Scene, Columbia, SC, are representative of much of Yaghjian’s work then. The scenes are also in several paintings in the retrospective. The coal car, of which there’s a 1950s study in the current exhibition, already showed up in his Ossining paintings.

That Yaghjian, born in Armenia, painted what some would consider mundane subject matter is not surprising. That in Columbia this would include scenes of the city’s African-American scene, isn’t either. Yaghjian was, Robin Waites wrote in a study of her grandfather, “raised in a 19th century clapboard home in an Armenian community segregated from the larger population of Providence, Rhode Island (in a) family supported by the corner grocery store run by his father and frequented by immigrants who were just getting by; this scene was familiar, alive and universal.”

David & Edmund Yaghjian: April 20- May 12, 2007

i f A R T G a l l e r y

presents

David & Edmund

Y A G H J I A N

April 20 – May 12, 2007

1223 Lincoln Street

Columbia, SC 29201

Artist’s Reception:

Friday, April 20, 5 – 10 p.m.

Artista Vista:

Thursday, April 26, 5 – 9 p.m.

Saturday, April 28, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Opening Hours:

Saturdays, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Sundays, closed, except May 6, open noon – 6:00 p.m.

Weekdays, noon – 7 p.m.

and by appointment

Contact Wim Roefs at if ART Gallery: (803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

For its first exhibition at if ART Gallery in Columbia, S.C., if ART, International Fine Art Services, presents an exhibition of works on paper by father-son duo Edmund and David Yaghjian. The show will run from April 20 – May 12, 2007. The exhibition will be part of Artista Vista, April 26 & 28, and the Columbia Festival of the Arts, April 26 – May 6.

Armenia native and longtime Columbia resident Edmund Yaghjian (1905-1997), whose retrospective is at the S.C. State Museum in Columbia until September 16, will be represented by gouaches, water colors, lithographs, drawings and studies. Yaghjian was the first chairman of the University of South Carolina art department and instrumental in establishing the Columbia Museum of Art, the Guild of S.C. Artists, and the Columbia Artists’ Guild. The older Yaghjian’s works in the if ART show are from the collections of his children.

Columbia native and resident David Yaghjian (b. 1948) will show monotypes produced in March at Phil Garrett’s King Snake Press in Greenville, S.C. Yaghjian focuses not on his well-known architectural themes but on his more recent body of art with an existential bent, involving a middle-aged man and his dog, wife, snake, belly and tribulations. The younger Yaghjian returned to Columbia from Atlanta in 2000.

The gallery, if ART Gallery, opened in November 2006. While if ART has been organizing exhibitions at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808 in Columbia for two years, the Yaghjian show will be its first exhibition at if ART Gallery.

if ART Gallery Opening: November 2006

OPEN NOW: 

if ART Gallery

1223 Lincoln St.

Columbia, S.C.

Gallery Hours:

Most days, except Sunday, from 11:00 AM – 7:00 PM

& by appointment (call 803-238-2351)

For more information, contact Wim Roefs at if ART

(803) 238-2351 – wroefs@sc.rr.com

On Nov. 10, 2006, if ART, International Fine Art Services, opened if ART Gallery. The gallery is at 1223 Lincoln St., Columbia, S.C., in the Vista district, across from the Blue Marlin restaurant. For more information, contact if ART’s Wim Roefs at (803) 238-2351 or wroefs@sc.rr.com.

If ART Gallery carries the work of South Carolina artists Leo Twiggs, Mike Williams, Carl Blair, Tom Stanley, Virginia Scotchie, Tonya Gregg, Peter Lenzo, Jeff Donovan, David Yaghjian, Anna Redwine, John Monteith, Christine Tedesco, Brown Thornton, Paul Yanko, Laura Spong, Steven Chapp, Katie Walker, Edward Rice, Aaron Baldwin, Bill Jackson, Herb Parker, Dorothy Netherland, Eric Miller, Mary Gilkerson, Matt Overend, Kim Keats and Phil Garrett. The gallery also carries work by Dutch artist Kees Salentijn, German artists Reiner Mahrlein, Roland Albert and Klaus Hartmann, and Washington Color Field painter Paul Reed.

The gallery also carries a wide selection of unframed and lithographs, silkscreens, etchings and other limited edition prints by such nationally and even internationally prominent artists such as Karel Appel, Richard Hunt, Bram van Velde, John Hultberg, Sam Middleton, Benny Andrews, Hannes Postma, Corneille, Lucebert and Alvin Hollingsworth.

Since March 2005, if ART, International Fine Art Services, has organized commercial gallery exhibitions in Columbia, mostly at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808. In addition to presenting gallery artists and special exhibitions at if ART Gallery, if ART will continue to organize exhibitions at Vista Studios/Gallery 80808. The company also provides curatorial and exhibition design services. 

Most recently, in September, if ART was hired by the Technical College of the Lowcountry to install dozens of art works at the college’s new building in Bluffton, S.C. Earlier this year, if ART installed two exhibitions of work from the South Carolina state art collection at the Sumter (S.C.) Gallery of Art. The if ART production “South Carolina Birds: A Fine Art Exhibition,” curated by company owner Wim Roefs, is at the Pickens County Museum of Art & History until Nov. 11, 2006. The exhibition opened in 2004 at the Sumter Gallery of Art and traveled to the Burroughs & Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and the City Gallery at Waterfront Park in Charleston, S.C. Roefs wrote the essay for the exhibition catalogue, which he also edited.

In 2005, Roefs curated exhibitions of work by Leo Twiggs and Carl Blair for the Fine Arts Center of Kershaw County in Camden, S.C. He also curated an exhibition of paintings by Marcelo Novo for HoFP Gallery in Columbia, S.C., and wrote the essay for the exhibition catalogue. Earlier this year, Roefs curated an exhibition with work by Dutch artist Kees Salentijn for the Center of the Arts in Rock Hill, S.C. In May, he curated an indoors/outdoors sculpture exhibition for the city of Dillon, S.C. 

Roefs contributed an essay to the catalogue for the exhibition “A Collection for Margaret: The Personal and Private Art of Carl Blair.” The exhibition is on view at Hampton III Gallery in Greenville until Nov. 11. Roefs teaches a course in African-American art at the University of South Carolina.

Since March 2005, if ART has published eight small exhibition catalogues. The catalogues featured short essays by Roefs about Aaron Baldwin, Mike Williams, Anna Redwine, Tom Stanley, Carl Blair, Janet Orselli, Matt Overend, Laura Spong, Leo Twiggs, Jeff Donovan, John Monteith, Dorothy Netherland, Herb Parker and Phil Garrett and Mary Gilkerson and the process of making monotypes.