Alejandro Avakian

Alejandro Avakian was born in 1959 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Avakian’s path as an artist was not planned. He was born to an Armenian family related to commerce and industry. The world of art didn’t seem a possible destination. He studied Economics and Biology at the University. It was only at the age of 27 that he thought of approaching painting. His vocation was born the day he faced a canvas for the first time. “What looked like a puzzle or nonsense acquired a new order. Passion had been awakened. I had to retrace all the way and start building again”.

He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón where he met his teacher Osvaldo Attila. He studied drawing and painting with Osvaldo Attila and in 1999 he received his degree in Art at Escuela Nacional. de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredón. Shortly afterwards he began to paint in a workshop in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of San Telmo. Academic life was left aside. In this way he could go deeper into the path of personal expression, where form and content go hand in hand and freedom becomes the basis for his work. It is at this point when the first white close-ups emerge and the figures in his paintings fade away. His language becomes Expressionist and sometimes excessive.

In his works Avakian redeems the elastic nobility of oil and the flexibility of the “well tightened” frame that provide the means to capture his universe nourished by Buenos Aires idiosyncrasy. The colors of the neighborhoods of San Telmo and Barracas are found in them, as are the rhythms of the music of Piazzola, Charly García, the voice of Goyeneche, and Armenian food aromas as well. In the inks of the lithographic stone and in the watery watercolors moving along the paper are the mornings spent at the coffee shops in Dumbo and the vital quality times in Manhattan.

The image expands and tightens in the large canvases that are born on the workshop floor in Barracas where Avakian paints with his whole body, to imprint on them with each brushstroke the passions and tragedies of his world, of our world. Unbiased by prejudices, in dense explosive connections or in lively songs of color. The imagination of Avakian embarks upon the always risky adventure of finding the not yet spoken words to lay bare the truth.

His trips leave a mark in his career as an artist. Movement is as much part of his work as of his life. In 2002 Avakian travels to Europe and sets up an exhibition at the Galería Magdalena Baxeras in Barcelona. On his return he takes part in the 12th Contemporary Art Fair of Buenos Aires. Almost without realizing it, his name starts to be known and his work appreciated. In 2004, he participates in an art exhibition at the Galerie des Tournelles in Paris, where he meets Jean Cherqui, one of the most important collectors of Argentine Concrete Art and Perceptism.

Alejandro continues to exhibit his artworks globally and has also been featured in solo museum exhibitions in Argentina to include: Museo Macsur in Buenos Aires and the Museo Nacional de Luján in Buenos Aires.

To see available works for sale by Alejandro Avakian, click here.