Ashot Asratyan "Trees, birds and more"

Ashot Asratyan is an independent artist, standing aside from any groups and associations. Lives and works in Moscow. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1971. He worked in the field of particle physics. He does not have professional art education, which he is very pleased with. He says that the teacher always imposes something on the students and usually teaches them to write a little worse than he does.

Starting with monochrome subject painting (black ink and gouache on paper), Ashot then did a large series of meaningless works in mixed media (collage and black gouache on paper). Ashot Asratyan received the first (and last) oil painting lessons from his friends and colleagues, Andrei Tal and Nikolay Chulkov, who left the neo-Cezannist school of Vladimir Weisberg. However, in the opinion of Ashot Asratyan, a painter should only be taught to wash his brushes correctly and correctly ground a canvas or hardboard.

Ashot Asratyan’s painting is genetically related to the tradition of post-war abstract expressionism, and he considers such masters as Mark Rothko, Nikola De Stal, Arshil Gorky (Vostanik Adoyan) and Hans Hoffman his teachers. However, Ashot himself calls the rollicking daub of some contemporaries “abstractionism,” and he prefers to call his works pointless or non-figurative. Like De Stael and Dibenkorn, Asratyan does not see the divide between the subject and non-subject art and says that even among the old masters, the subject is just a visual occasion for real painting, and non-figurative art has coexisted with figurative art since prehistoric times. With his painting, Ashot Asratyan seeks to show the relevance and vitality of the traditional lines of fine art from neo-Cezannism to figurative and abstract expressionism, as opposed to the fruitless “zaum” of conceptualism and the fun post-modern “sidewalk picnic”.

Ashot Asratyan previously exhibited his works in the House of Scientists of the Troitsk academic town near Moscow in 1979 and 1980 (together with A. Tal, N. Chulkov and S. Tivetsky), at the Moscow Literary Institute in 1981 (together with A. Tal), in the House of Scientists Yerevan Institute of Physics in 1982 (together with A. Tal), in an empty settled communal apartment on Arbat in 1985 (together with A. Tal and N. Chulkov), in an art gallery on Nagornaya street in 1989 (together with A. Tal and N. Chulkov), at the Moscow House of Scientists in 2010 (personal exhibition) and at the University of Friendship of Peoples in 2015 (personal exhibition).

At the exhibition of Ashot Asratyan in the Fine Art Gallery, works from the series “Dichotomies”, “Birds” and “Trees” (2012-2019), as well as older “non-serial” works are shown. A.A.