Human Rights Painting

BIOGRAPHY 1960 Born in Gyumri, Armenia. Lives in Yerevan, Armenia. 1977 School of Fine Arts,Gyumri,Armenia. 1989 Armenian Pedagogical University. Drawing. PERSONAL EXHIBITIONS 2010 "Between The Images 3" Artology 101 Gallery . Los Angeles. 2010 "Between The Images 2" 1927 Gallery. Los Angeles. CA 2009 "Between The Images" One Gallery. Yerevan,Armenia 2008 Modern Art Museum of Armenia 2006 First Floor Gallery. Yerevan, Armenia 2003 "MIND GAMES", First Floor Gallery. Yerevan, Armenia 1994 Bossen Cultural Center. Saarbrucken, Germany 1998 JNR Gallery. Yerevan, Armenia This is the message that underlies Arthur Sarkissian's oeuvre. In Sarkissian's paintings what-is-known meets what-is-felt within the bounds of the picture plane. What is "felt" - embodied in Sarkissian's painterly gestures and rich coloration - maintains its integrity, and what is "known" - concretized in the images Sarkissian finds in mass media and transfers to the heart of his artworks - continues to evince its source in widely disseminated formats such as newspapers and books. But despite this obvious polarity, Sarkissian effects a remarkably easy and unstrained flow between the felt and the known, between raw brushstroke and transferred image. Each element becomes not just a foil, but a partner, for the other. A passage lifted (not literally, as in collage, but photographically, through silkscreen) from an art history textbook or illuminated manuscript or magazine still "reports" its information, but becomes at the same time a factor in a larger composition, enmeshed in painterly incident. Meanwhile, without losing the passion invested in it by Sarkissian's hand, such painterly incident is ordered into a certain rational structure, one that echoes the lexical coherence that photographic imagery promulgates. Sarkissian's paintings are at once wholes and sums of parts, and they "talk" to us in several visual languages at once. Such a polyglot, polysemic art is hardly unique to Sarkissian. We see his style anticipated by Robert Rauschenberg, and before him Kurt Schwitters. We even see its textures and practices, as well as philosophical positions, reflected in the work of such disparate predecessors as Warhol, Cornell, Miro, Malevich, and, of course, Picasso.