Hamlet Hovsepian

Hamlet Hovsepian was born in 1950, in Ashnak, Armenia, and passed away in 2022. He graduated from Panos Terlemezyan Art College (Yerevan) in 1974.

 

Hamlet Hovsepian is one of the most significant figures of the Armenian contemporary art scene and a pioneer in video art in the Caucasian area. He has been working with film and video since the early 1970s. The use of metals; aluminium, gold and bronze together with oil paint in his art reflect his belief of the importance of nature since metals and minerals are the “wealth of the Earth”, buried deep within it.

 

Through the performative procedures of the Abstract Expressionists, Hamlet Hovsepian accumulates raw brushstrokes that give way to purely formal compositions, capturing the viewer with an urge for a seemingly impossible naratives. Nonetheless, one narrative these paintings compel to disclose is that of Action Painting itself. The smears of Willem de Kooning, the scrumbles of Franz Kline, the dripped lines of Jackson Pollock and the graffiti marks of Cy Twombly have been recapitulated in Havsepian’s highly gestural paintings. As these works announce ongoing connections to such precedents, they attest to the inexhaustible well of modernist aesthetics. The “pure automatism” of these paintings is revealed through myriad application methods that range from loose to tight grips on the brush, from nervous twists of the wrist to enegetic brushstrokes. At times the composition of Hovsepian pairs unbroken spatial immensity with loose gestural sweeps carrying drips of paint, while at other times the medium of painting becomes paired with fragments of Dadaist, readymade objects, thereby attaching the inner life of the expressive and indexical mark to the cerebral ethos of Duchamp and Rauschenberg. The accumulation of expressive marks upon the surface of Hovsepian’s paintings champions an astounding revival of Abstract Expressionism.