Your trusted source

The National Gallery of Armenia on Friday launched an exhibition marking the 145th anniversary of  outstanding painter Vahram Gayfejian.

Vahram Gayfejian (1879–1960) was one of the founders of Armenian fine arts and artistic education in the 20th century. He was a prominent representative of Armenian Impressionism and one of the first Armenian modernists, whose art was shaped at the beginning of the 20th century within the context of Russian avant-garde, becoming part of that movement. Vahram Gayfejyan is also one of the founders of industrial and urban genres in Armenian visual arts.

This exhibition "At the Origins of Abstractivism" mostly presents the series "Decorative Motifs" and "Colour Compositions" (1902–1907), which are exceptional gems from the early Moscow period of the artist’s Art Nouveau and symbolist style. During his lifetime, the artist kept these "dangerous" works secret, and only after his death did his daughter, art historian Ellen Gayfejyan, discover them, make them public, and study them. In his youth, Gayfejyan was deeply engaged with the programmatic ideas of the Art Nouveau era, seeking through a radical renewal of artistic language, associative and intuitive reflections, to reveal the inner, invisible, spiritual essences and feelings. In this process, the visual form merges with music, prefiguring the ideas of synesthesia introduced by the founder of abstractionism, Wassily Kandinsky.

A sensitive intellectual, Gayfejian approached abstract art several years before Kandinsky, but his experiments, due to external circumstances, did not continue. However, in these miniature masterpieces, there is an aspiration for a breakthrough into monumental space, which we can today see through their digital projection at an enlarged scale.

The exhibition curator is Lilit Sargsyan.