Zadik Zadikian: RETURN

May 06, 2025 RETURN, Zadik Zadikian’s first-ever exhibition in his home country, Armenia, is presented by the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. Featuring the American-Armenian artist’s pivotal monumental work, Foreigners, the project marks a homecoming shaped by a lifetime of exile, transformation, and visionary creation. After nearly six decades away, Zadikian’s return is not merely personal; it is a profound act of artistic and existential reintegration.
Foreigners is reimagined and reborn in Armenia as a monumental, site-specific installation. 

More than a reinstallation, the work has undergone a metamorphosis: the artist has conceived an entire sculptural environment around it. The monumental wall at Gallery One has been transformed into a crafted black void — a space that not only supports the work but becomes its integral part.

Situated in a public space with continuous human flow, the work extends beyond its physical form into lived experience. The golden faces suspended in the void begin to mirror the passing visitors, blending the identities of bystanders into the installation itself. In this way, Foreigners becomes not only a meditation on displacement but an immersive encounter — where the line between a viewer and image, a stranger and self, dissolves.

Across this deliberately shaped cosmic field, thousands of golden faces emerge, scattered like stardust, suspended between appearance and dissolution. Their gilded forms hover over the darkness like constellations of memory etched into timeless space.

Zadik Zadikian dedicates his first exhibition in Armenia to the memory of the fallen soldiers of the 2020 Artsakh war.

Zadik Zadikian (born in 1946 in Yerevan, Armenia) is an Armenian-American artist renowned for his transformative use of gold leaf in sculpture and installation art. After studying at the Panos Terlemezian Art Academy in Yerevan, to seek artistic freedom he escaped from the Soviet Union in 1966, swimming across the Araks River. He settled in San Francisco in 1968, where he worked with sculptor Benjamin Bufano, and later moved to New York City in 1973, collaborating with minimalist artist Richard Serra.

In New York, Zadikian began creating immersive installations, including painting entire rooms and altering architectural spaces at venues like White Columns and 112 Greene Street. His 1975 installation at P.S.1, NY, 1,000 Bricks Gilded in 24-Carat Gold Leaf, at Tony Shafrazi Gallery, Tehran, in 1978, marked the beginning of his exploration of gold as a symbol of warmth, energy, and transformation.

Zadikian's work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and institutions, including the Tony Shafrazi Gallery (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), Newport Harbor Art Museum (California), Maloney Fine Art (Los Angeles), and internationally at Art Dubai (with Etemad Gallery) and Presunic Gallery (Paris and Tel Aviv). From 2014 to 2017, he was part of TransAngeles: Crossover Experimentation, which showed at Wilhelm-Morgner-Haus, Soest (D), 2014, Chabot Museum, Rotterdam (NL), 2016, and Neuer Kunstverein Aschaffenburg (D), 2017. In 2024, his installation "Path to Nine," featuring 999 gold-leafed ingots, was showcased at the Brooklyn Museum's 200th anniversary exhibition, "Solid Gold."

Currently residing in Los Angeles, CA, Zadikian continues to explore minimalist forms and the symbolic power of gold through his sculptures and installations.