Tigran Malkhasyan was born in 1964. Since the age of twelve he was fascinated by drawing, and subsequently by painting; since 1986 he has been active in the artistic life of St Petersburg and Moscow.
Gradually enlarging the area of his creative vision and with it an expanding sphere of knowledge, Tigran subjected to his own specific creative needs a huge amount of visual means, and thereby formed his own unique language of image processing.
Tigran himself explains the mechanism of the action of his works on the spectator as follows: “After looking at a certain image, familiar in the majority of the cases to any spectator, I process it in my mind rather in the way that a cryptographer unlocks a code with the help of a cipher book. The apparent similarity of the old code with the new lets the spectator observe a familiarity with the image, and so I can draw him into the picture, but not in the way he perhaps intends, in reverse as it were. In other words, I am laying down a path of perception.”
His long-standing enthusiasm for technical disciplines coupled with his knowledge of the world might be said to have allowed Tigran to start his career on a higher sphere than if he had stayed within the academic world of the history of art and its pictorial dictates.
The characteristic branching lines of paint on the surface of the canvas, that are formed by the force of gravity, here seep and penetrate not only into the visualized images of the plethora of nature’s beings on earth – be they birds’ feathers or fern fronds – rather like blood vessels reaching into the lungs, but also form the base of many industrial units and structures.
An artist with a quickened perception of the world that we live in today Tigran introduces that perception into his works; hence his use of oil products as his paint pigments.
“Don’t go into an artists’ store for your materials! There you will find only tired paints and overworked brushes.
One has to live in this age, and to work with the materials of the age.
Only I can’t paint with money, so that leaves oil!
”CollectionsThe work of Tigran Malkhasyan can be found in private collections in Russia and abroad in German, USA and Japan, and is also shown in the Contemporary Art Museum of Moscow and in the State Russian Museum of Saint Petersburg.
