Gayane Avetissian

Gayane Avetissian was born in 1995, Yerevan, Armenia. She studied at the Painting Department of Panos Terlemezyan State College of Fine Arts in Yerevan between 2012-2017 and after at the Graphics Department of Academy of Fine Arts between 2017-2020. After her graduation, she strated to study at the Institute of Contemprory Art after Joseph Backstein in Moscow (Russia) in 2021.

 

Gayane Avetissian is an artist who works mostly with traditional media but aims to reconsider painting in terms of contemporary art, as well as in relation to other disciplines, including performance and installation. Although she graduated from the Graphics department of the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia, her artistic interests have always been much broader. She explores the essence of art in general with the concept of life-long learning when the artist grows with his/her art through their oeuvre. In the last ten years she has participated in many group exhibitions not only in Armenia, but also in Lebanon and Russia. She has also worked as an artistic director for several theatre performances in Armenia. Avetissian’s latest accomplishment was to be selected as a resident at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow while studying with a full scholarship at the Institute of Contemporary Art after J. Backstein.

 

Today she is more focused on exploring new media and artistic languages in the scope of contemporary conceptual art. In her works, Avetissian projects personal experiences, mixed professional background, childhood traumas, fears, and philosophical ideas through original visual narratives at the intersection of abstractionism, conceptualism, primitivism, neo-expressionism and realism.

 

Her latest series of works, under the general title “Blackboard”, explore not only the fundamental importance of education for the person as a whole, but also how educational system transforms us having vital impact on the society. This brings us to the perspective of philosophical discourse tabula rasa, where a person is perceived initially as a “blank slate” and therefore all knowledge comes from experience or perception. In “Blackboard” series she reflects on her memories and experience that derive from her ideas of reconsideration of institutional education, the idea of “rights” and “wrongs”, and how the blackboards at school transform into the blackboards of life: in this case, of the artist.