FIRST SOLO SHOW AT LORI BOOKSTEIN FINE ART FOR VARUJAN BOGHOSIAN
Art Daily
Dec 29 2009
Varujan Boghosian, American Bouquet, 1997. Mixed media construction,
26" x 18" x 2 1/2".
NEW YORK, NY.- Through January 9th, 2010, Lori Bookstein Fine Art is
presenting constructions, collages and sculpture by Varujan Boghosian.
This is the artist’s first solo show at Lori Bookstein, following a
two-person show with Paul Resika in 2006.
A lifelong collector, Boghosian’s studio is a veritable trove of
old children’s toys, antiquated tools and oddball objects, a palette
composed not of paint but of parts and scraps scavenged from constant
trips to flea markets and antique stores. His working method is
characterized by the various roles of selector, editor, builder,
juxtaposer. The artist’s collages, like his relief constructions and
boxes, cherish the out-dated and the cast-off and revitalize them
with new meaning, contemporaneity and aesthetic value.
Time is an essential element; present in the varied histories of
Boghosian’s chosen working materials, but also part of the working
process. Objects amass in his studio, perhaps waiting years for their
new purpose to reveal itself. Once re-contextualized, the materials,
however surprisingly and often surrealistically reconfigured by the
artist, tend to manifest their agedness and their vulnerability but
are also rescued from it. The recognition of intended purposes is
vital to Boghosian’s work, and yet, his skill in transcending prior
meanings and identities allows for a conversation with the past while
circumventing nostalgia.
History and legend are themselves employed as tools to be recast by the
artist. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has been one such source which
Boghosian has mined repeatedly. Although the viewer sees glimpses of
the story – allusions to music, fleeting gazes of disembodied eyes –
the relationship is never so concrete as to be definitive. Robert
M. Doty, curator of Boghosian’s 1989 retrospective exhibition at
the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, explains how the artist creates
something ever larger out of the bits and pieces of component parts:
There is a mood about the work, a stirring of feelings about life
and death, which is greater than the specific narrative and has
universal meaning and appeal. Boghosian has revitalized the myth of
Orpheus in his own terms, using physical means to create images which
act as catalysts for transforming individual rapport into the most
fundamental human experience.
Varujan Boghosian was born in 1926 in New Britain, Connecticut, the son
of Armenian immigrants. After serving three years in the Navy during
World War II, Boghosian attended college under the G.I. Bill. A 1953
Fulbright Grant allowed him several years of travel and work in Italy,
until he returned to America and enrolled in the Yale School of Art
and Architecture to study under Josef Albers.
Boghosian has exhibited extensively, showing for years at Stable
Gallery and Cordier & Ekstrom. He is currently represented by Berta
Walker Gallery in Provincetown and Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New
York. Public collections include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts,
the Hood Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of
Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. The artist, retired from a 35-year
teaching career at Yale, Brown and Dartmouth, lives and continues to
work in Hanover, New Hampshire.