Narek Arzumanyan

Narek Arzumanyan was born in 1988, in Yerevan, Armenia. He graduated from Yerevan State College of Fine Arts after P. Terlemezyan in 2008 and studied in State Academy of Fine Arts betwen 2009 and 2011. He opened his first exhibition in the Artists’ Union of Armenia, in 2009. Since 2011 he lives in Nuremberg, Germany.

Arzumanyan belongs to the rear “cohort” of artists, who may be called artists for artists. His art is so deeply experience-based and intense in its primordial savagery that only the professional look may feel and discern the master of composition and art prodigy. It’s enough for a sophisticated spectator to look at his multiple realistic, anatomically accurate caricatures and brilliant cartoons drawn with ink, brush, pen or marker. The quality of these sketches demonstrates the exceptional artistic skills and mastery, which is, as a rule, achieved through years of learning arts and crafts. Attention should be drawn on the artist’s natural sense of line, proportion and composition, abilities similar to the innate sense of color or absolute pitch. This is vividly seen from the sketchbooks, albums of the artist preserved from his childhood.

As the painter confessed, he had never been fond of the “classical, realistic approach to the art”. His tendency towards expressive imagery and grotesque transformation of depicted objects is apparent already in his student works. During this period the paintings and drawings of Honoré Daumier became the source of inspiration for most of Arzumanyan’s student works. Later he discovered the art of Francis Bacon. As it turned out, the theme of physical and spiritual suffering, loss, death, despair were very close to Arzumanyan’s heart and subsequently became the leitmotif of his art. These themes resonated with the personal problems of the painter: non-admission of his artistic vision of the world, complicated relations in the family, health problems.

Ever since his study in the art school Arzumanyan showed a strong interest in self-portrait. Since then, this interest only increased and proneness to introspection became one of the key themes in the artwork of the painter.

In the pastel works of the artist the painting style changes drastically. If during the years spent in the art college and the Academy he was strongly influenced by Francis Bacon, in Germany the painter comes to a new formal interpretation of images. The attitude towards composition is also reviewed. The interest towards the three-dimensional form is neutralized, the spatial and volumetric interpretation of a picture plane changes. Even in his early works the painter was not very interested in linear-aerial perspectives, and already in Germany his compositions become explicitly plane. The primary nature of artistic image, its personal, deep meaning is highlighted. This is also facilitated by the choice of material - oil pastels. Energetic, uncompromising strokes of compressed pigment, in some places delicate shading of shapes give the works incredible strength.