The Grenning Gallery is pleased to announce our 6th Annual Solo Show for Darius Yektai. Please join us and meet the artist at the Opening Reception, Thursday, July 17th from 6:00 to 7:30 pm at 26 Main Street, Sag Harbor, NY, 11963. The exhibition hangs through Sunday, August 3rd, 2025.
Darius Yektai’s new body of work requires us to take a literal step back; These paintings are large and bold; colors synthesizing an abstract song about nature and emotion. The landscape plays the role of background, rooted in observational elements like branches, willow leaves, mountains, and horizon lines, combined with rich colors and gestural brushwork. Up close, we can investigate his decisions in the artistic process, but from afar, we recognize the prodigious skill of an abstract composer.
Yektai returns to an iconic subject; He has reignited our passion for the water lily landscape, with these rich, moody, powerful paintings. In Pond, the resin Yektai uses is poured onto the canvas and does not reach the edges; instead, it pools in the center, demonstrating the dramatic effect that the resin has on these paintings. The color appears richer and darker, as if it’s been varnished over. In person, this painting displays the inviting juxtaposition of two surfaces the artist plays in: the wet appearance of reflective resin, and dry, flat linen canvas.
Darius Yektai is delivering unexpected compositions, engaging and sensual surfaces, and creating powerful color pairings. We experience these paintings twice; The first time, as an image, the second, as a tactile surface. Moreover, his paintings often transcend the 2-dimensional plane and lean towards the sculptural. The textures, patterns, and materials in these paintings add so many layers to this work that, even after seeing them a hundred times, we can still notice something new. The generous nature of these paintings is part of what makes collectors of Yektai’s work fall in love with them.
Many of these paintings combine still life and landscape in an exciting and unorthodox style that Yektai has been developing for over 30 years. His thick impasto brushwork facilitates a tension between representation and abstraction. Pink Hydrangeas in a Clay Vase is grounded by the still life in its center; While the table fashioned with canvas strips creates structure and weight, the top half demonstrates Yektai’s affinity for organized chaos, mimicking a shower of leaves, water, and branches, all while withholding the detail we’re looking for. As a result, these paintings captivate our curious gaze as we search for something to hold on to and imagine the movement behind each mark.
In several paintings, Yektai extends the image over the edge and onto the frame; literally coloring outside of the box. This method invites us to reconsider the role of framing; here he demonstrates that even when he’s painting a classical subject - a vase on a table - he won’t be bound by what is traditionally considered the visual container of his image. This technique extends the image in a daring and physical way.
Yektai’s unbounded creative process is breathing new life into these textbook subjects. He is prodding the viewer to question their ideas on what a still life is, what a landscape is… that these subjects can instead be tools that plunder your preconceptions instead of reinforcing them.
In MilkyWay Stargazers, Yektai switches his gaze, from looking down onto bodies of water adorned with waterlilies and willow trees, to looking up at the vast, wide open night sky. Ironically, the artist chose white pebbles to convey the shimmering galactic trail of the Milky Way. Tiny stones that are usually situated on the ground to be stepped upon are instead thrown into the sky. Forms of shooting stars and ambiguous constellations are depicted through cutouts in the base of the “canvas,” which in this case, is cardboard. Two silhouettes stand before the composition, gazing straight ahead at the sky above them. The resin poured atop the cardboard darkens the composition to a rich brown - reflecting the setting of the painting’s environs, including any viewer that comes to greet the painting.
WhiIe we appreciate Yektai’s naturalist impulse to create landscapes and still life paintings that are inspired by his direct observation, we admire his creative risk-taking even more. Many artists are attracted to finding a lane, where they find their paintings garnering the most success, where the sales are most lucrative, and then stay there. Darius Yektai, however, finds his path by following his own creative curiosity and dives deeper into that path, regardless of the viewers’ response to the work. He bravely keeps searching, painting, and collaging with new and found materials as he explores any creative lead. He is game to accept the challenges that come up in his intellectually open and flowing process. As a result, a visit to his studio is always packed with surprises, even for us, who visit every few weeks!
