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The National Gallery of Armenia is opening today an exhibition of the artworks of Minas Avetisyan, a renowned Armenian painter of the 20th century.

The exhibition titled “Minas: Old and Completely New”, is expected to bring together over 90 works of the painter from the National Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan Modern Art Museum, the museums of Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the Museum of Russian Art in Yerevan and Aram Khachaturian Museum, as well as from Armenia’s private collections.

“The exhibition comprehensively reveals Minas’s activity in most various spheres, including easel and monumental painting, graphic art, scenography and cinematography, meantime involving electronic documentary materials,” the gallery’s press service told Panorama.am.

The event is dedicated to the renowned artist’s 90th birth anniversary. “This exhibition is yet another great opportunity to re-evaluate his art and to represent it to the coming generations,” the gallery said.

Born in 1928 in Armenia’s Jajur village, Minas Avetisyan was a painter and set designer. From 1952 to 1954, he studied at the Institute of Theater and Art in Yerevan, and from 1954 to 1960, at the Ilya Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

He benefited from the advice of famous Armenian painter Martiros Saryan, but developed a style of his own, with an intense use of color similar to that of Fauvism. The influence of Armenian medieval art is strongly apparent in his landscapes, self-portraits and scenes of peasant life. His work combines an uncommon and expressive richness of color with a dramatic monumentality of composition. In 1962, he had a one-man show in Yerevan, and another in Moscow in 1969. In 1972, a fire in his studio destroyed a large portion of his work.

In 1974, the artist designed the sets for Aram Khachaturian’s ballet Gayane at the A. Spendiarov Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet in Yerevan. Following his death in a car accident in 1975, a museum devoted to Avetisyan opened in his native village.