The first solo exhibition of paintings by Darius Yektai in New York City will be on view at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (LTMH) Gallery from September 16 through October 8, 2009. Darius Yektai: All I Know About Love at Thirty-Six will include over 15 portraits and landscapes focusing on intimate scenes of the artist’s everyday life. A companion exhibition will be held at Salomon Contemporary in East Hampton, NY, from August 28 through October 5, 2009. An illustrated catalogue entitled Darius Yektai: All I Know About Love at Thirty-Six with an essay by Robert C. Morgan, will accompany the exhibitions.

Using camera snapshots as reference, Darius Yektai vigorously covers wood panels and canvases with paint giving energy to quiet poses, exploring shifting attitudes towards his memories, and finding new possibilities for combining the physical and the psychological. One of the exhibition highlight’s, Father Son Father (2009), a loose, open summer painting of the artist, his father, and son relaxing indoors in front of a panoramic view of the landscape, is intensely personal yet resonates with universal meaning. In many of his works, Yektai cuts pieces of the canvases out—either removing them completely, or reapplying them. This sculptural attitude has remained integral to a working process that he reveals willingly in every piece. Art historian Phyllis Braff has written, “Yektai is at his boldest when his message and the overt physicality of his materials merge.”

As Robert C. Morgan writes in the catalogue essay, “Yektai is concerned with how to achieve coherence in painting without sacrificing intuition; whatever painters made happen in the past had to be reevaluated in the present. His challenge became one of moving the surface of a painting to another level, not simply repeating old ideas, but extending them in an entirely new dimension. The artist has taken visual ideas from early modernism and transformed them through his own uninhibited language.”

Darius Yektai, 36, was born in Southampton, New York, and is of Iranian and Greek descent. His work is on view at the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City in Iran Inside Out, which is on exhibit until September 5, 2009. His work was also included in Selseleh/Zelzeleh: Movers & Shakers in Contemporary Iranian Art at Leila Taghinia-Milani Heller (LTMH) Gallery, which included work by 40 contemporary Iranian artists. Yektai’s work is in the collection of the Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY.