For a new set of four solo exhibitions, if ART Gallery in Columbia, SC, presents paintings by Columbia artist David Yaghjian; collages made from cut-up prints by Easley, SC, artist Steven Chapp; works on paper by Sullivan’s Island native and Virginia resident Aggie Zed; and etchings and lithographs from the 1960 by the late Dutch artist Hannes Postma, who died last year at age 87. Postma’s prints are exhibited in the Print Room @ if ART. All exhibitions will run through September 18.
Yaghjian’s exhibition, Walking With Bulls, presents an overview of his use of the bull motif in his paintings over the past decade. Aside from incorporating bulls as part of his scenes, Yaghjian recently has created several paintings exclusively focused on the animal. Chapp has for decades been one of the most prominent printmakers on the South Carolina art scene. In the past year, he has taken old prints and recycled parts of them in fresh, new collages. Zed has a huge following nationwide as a ceramic artist and mixed-media sculptor. While her ceramics and sculptures also are available at if ART, the current exhibition focuses on her pastel-and ink works on paper, which are as spectacularly fantastical as her sculptures. Postma as a young artist in the 1960s instantly made a name for himself with his etchings and lithographs, and his work was acquired by museums all over, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
About the Artists
Columbia native Yaghjian (b. 1948) is a mainstay on the city’s art scene and among the most original contemporary painters in the Carolinas. He was selected for the 701 Center for Contemporary Art South Carolina Biennial 2013, 2015and 2017. Yaghjian was featured in the 2012 book 100 Southern Artists. The exhibition catalogue David Yaghjian: Everyman Turns Sixaccompanied a major 2011 solo exhibition at Gallery 80808/Vista Studios in Columbia, organized by if ART Gallery. Another exhibition, 2015’s Scenesat if ART Gallery, also came with a catalogue, with a long, poetic artist statement by Yaghjian. Yaghjian has shown extensively throughout the Southeast, including at South Carolina’s Greenville County Museum of Art; Blue Spiral I in Asheville, N.C.; the Florence (S.C.) Museum of Art; the S.C. State Museum and McKissick Museum in Columbia; and the Spruill Center Gallery in Atlanta.
Chapp (b. 1952), owner of Black Dog Press, is a native of Kansas City, Mo. For more than three decades, he has been a steady presence on the South Carolina art scene, especially in the Upstate. Best known as a expert printmaker, Chapp has shown in galleries, art centers and museums throughout the region, including the Greenville County (S.C.) Museum of Art, the Burroughs and Chapin Museum in Myrtle Beach, S.C., the Spartanburg (S.C.) Art Museum and the Pickens County (S.C.) Museum of Art and History. He worked on two projects with artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, in Kansas City in 1978 and Key Biscayne, Fla., in 1983. Chapp has retired as a teacher for the Greenville County School District. He holds an MFA in printmaking and drawing from Clemson University and a BFA from Appalachian State University.
Zed (b. 1952) grew up in a large family on Sullivan's Island riding ponies and donkeys on the beach and watching her father repair television sets. Zed’s major 2012 solo exhibition Keeper’s Keeporiginated at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary art at the College of Charleston, was accompanied by an extensive publication and traveled to Louisiana and two Virginia venues. Zed has had more than two-dozen solo exhibitions and shown in dozens of group shows, mostly in the Southeast. Zed's sculpture ranges from intimately-scaled ceramic figures of people and human-animal hybrids to copper wire and ceramic horses to ceramic and mixed-metals contrivances she calls "scrap floats". Her scrap floats are intended as entries in a parade of the future.Zed graduated in 1974 with a BFA from the University of South Carolina and lives in Gordonsville, VA.
Postma (1933 – 2020) early in his career was fascinated with children’s drawings and interested in spontaneous experimentation. The figurative expressionist work inhabited with floating, entangled, bulky figures seemed related to the CoBrA legacy in The Netherlands, and Postma admired CoBrA artists such as Karel Appel and Lucebert as well as Art Brut artist Jean Dubuffet. Postma never belonged to or associated with the CoBrA movement or its members, though, and denies being influenced by them. His later paintings had strong Surrealist, architectural and constructivist tendencies. Postma’s work is in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Pasadena (Calif.) Norton Simon Museum, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands, the Modern Art Museum and National Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, the Modern Art Museum in Malmö, Sweden, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, and many other museums across Europe. His 1999 career retrospective was at Arnhem’s Museum voor Moderne Kunst and the Dordrecht’s Museum, both in The Netherlands.
