Gagik Ghazanchyan։ unFamiliar City

The title reflects both the spirit of Gagik Ghazanchyan’s recent work and his artistic engagement with urban environments, conceived between the recognizable and the unrecognizable.

The title unFamiliar City reflects both the spirit of Gagik Ghazanchyan’s recent work and his artistic engagement with urban environments, conceived between the recognizable and the unrecognizable. Within abstract, multicolored layers, a cityscape suddenly emerges; a building or district appears recognizable, yet the image is difficult to associate with any specific place. The familiar remains interwoven with the unfamiliar, just as recognizable urban fragments persist within artistic forms that obscure, displace and transform them.

Bringing together works created between 2024 and 2026, the exhibition initially confronts the viewer with dense fields of lines, stains and painterly gestures that may appear abstract. Gradually, however, fragments of urban imagery emerge: photographs of isolated skyscrapers or entire high-rise districts transferred onto canvas and seen from varying elevations and perspectives.

This condition recalls French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of the “non-place”: spaces organized primarily around transit and consumption rather than dwelling, attachment and enduring socio-cultural relations. They therefore lack a stable identity and historical depth and are not shaped through enduring human relationships.

The city appears in these works not only as an image but also as a trace. Tire marks run across the painted surfaces, sometimes forming distinct rings and loops. They register physical movement while simultaneously functioning as abstract forms.

Significantly, the human figure is largely absent, yet human experience remains central, conveyed through both the urban environments and the artist’s own gestures. Ultimately, this is not so much an exhibition about the material form of cities as about how cities are felt when the identities, meanings and coordinates of their familiar structures begin to dissolve.

unFamiliar City is also presented within the framework of ‘’Natura Naturans: Human Beings, Nature, Landscape’’, a project of the CYFEST 17 International Media Art Festival. Within this context, the exhibition approaches the contemporary city as a human-made landscape—an environment created by us that, in turn, reorganizes how we move, see and live.

Gagik Ghazanchyan was born in Yerevan in 1960. From 1975 to 1979, he studied in the Painting Department of the Panos Terlemezian State College of Fine Arts in Yerevan, followed by studies in the Graphic Arts Department of the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts and Theater from 1984 to 1990. He has been a member of the Artists’ Union of Armenia since 1992. Having begun his artistic career in the 1980s, Ghazanchyan has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Armenia and abroad over the past four decades. His solo exhibitions have been held at the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan, the National Center of Aesthetics, and the Artists’ Union of Armenia, as well as in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Zurich, Beirut, and elsewhere. His works have also been presented in Moscow, Paris, Nice, Berlin, Rome, Naples, Tehran, New York, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait, and elsewhere. In 2018, he was represented in the group exhibition, 11: Selections of Armenian Contemporary Abstract Art at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. In 2020, Ghazanchyan received the Prize of the President of the Republic of Armenia in the field of art. His works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Armenia and the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan, as well as in private collections in Armenia and abroad.