Paul Sarkisian

Paul Sarkisian has worked in numerous styles and media throughout his long career as a painter. This exhibition will survey the last ten years and feature more than twenty large-scale pieces, as well as one of the artist’s well-known storefront paintings from the seventies. The historical work in question is an immense, wall-sized piece entitled El Paso (1971-72). This monochromatic faux-façade represents an existing structure the artist encountered during his travels across the United States and the painting offers a meticulous rendering of the buildings architecture. In addition, the artist has added exquisite details, recollected from memory and culled from his imagination, of objects and reflections seen in the buildings interior.

From this captivating example of his prowess in photo-realist painting, Sarkisian moved through several stylistic changes to arrive at the extreme opposite—a post-minimalist approach in his more recent work of the last decade. While still painting on a monumental scale, he has been using polymer resin and automotive enamel on wood panels, which, when mounted together on the wall, produce giant, luminous objects where nuance of surface, texture, and color is paramount. Guest-curated by Louis Grachos, director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, this exhibition will be the first museum presentation of this significant body of work, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, with an introduction by Grachos and an essay by Christopher Cordes.

Paul Sarkisian, who has lived and worked in the Santa Fe area since 1972, was born in Chicago in 1928 and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, and Mexico City College. His extensive listing of solo exhibitions include the ARCO Center for the Visual Arts, Los Angeles; the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara; and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His work has been included in many important group exhibitions such as the Merry Go Round show, Santa Monica; Documenta V, Kassel, Germany; the Whitney Annual, New York City; Sharp Focus, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York; Radical Realism, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Painting in the Age of Photography, Kunsthaus, Zurich; and Illusions of Reality, Australia National Gallery, Canberra. His work is in numerous public collections which include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Pasadena Art Museum; the Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Aachen Museum in Germany, and exhibitions at Walter Hopps’ Syndell Studios and Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.

Funding for the exhibition is made possible in part by Dottie and Dick Barrett, Pat Hall, Barbara and Michael Ogg, and Joann and Gifford Phillips.

Pressetext

Paul Sarkisian
Kurator: Louis Grachos
Organisation: SITE Santa Fe