Biography: David Yaghjian

            David Yaghjian

            David Yaghjian (b. 1948) is a mainstay on the Columbia, S.C., art scene and among the most original contemporary painters in the Carolinas. Long known for his paintings of houses and other architectural structures and urban environments, Yaghjian made a drastic change a decade ago. While the desire for a change had been growing, the immediate impetus was an invitational exhibition around the theme “Fool for Art” at the University of South Carolina’s McKissick Museum, for which Yaghjian created two paintings. 

            What many thought of at first as a temporary departure turned into a new body of work that Yaghjian has sustained ever since. The new development was on view during the 2009 exhibition Dancing Man, organized by if ART Gallery at Columbia’s Gallery 80808/Vista Studios. The exhibition catalogue David Yaghjian: Everyman Turns Six, which accompanied a major 2011 solo exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios, extensively documented Yaghjian’s new direction.

            Yaghjian was selected for the 701 Center for Contemporary Art South Carolina Biennial 2013 and 2015. He was featured in the 2012 book 100 Southern Artists. In 2012, the Columbia native was included in Faces of Figureworks: Self Portraitsat Figureworks gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. The exhibition included works by Byron Browne, Philip Evergood, Red Grooms, Chaim Gross, Jack Levine and Raphael and Moses Soyer. Yaghjian 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; the South Carolina 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.