Nairobi Nights
Garo Antreasian
Created : 1995
Donated : 1995
Medium : Mixed Media/two-dimensional
Dimensions: 84 inx66 in
Located: 3rd Floor,Rotunda
Garo Antreasian (b. 1922)
Albuquerque
Gift of the Artist
Capitol Art Collection, Capitol Art Foundation
Garo Antreasian is the son of Armenian immigrants who fled the genocide of their people in Turkey to settle in Indianapolis. He graduated from the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis in 1948, then continued to teach there for sixteen more years. Antreasian, who began as a painter, shifted his focus to printmaking in 1960 when he was hired by the Ford Foundation as Technical Director of the newly created Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, which later moved to Albuquerque.
In 1964, Antreasian came to the University of New Mexico where he helped develop the printmaking program and chaired the Department of Art and Art History from 1981 to 1984. In 1987 he retired from teaching and has been able to revive his career in painting without distraction.
Antreasian describes his geometric abstractions as “cubist- and constructivist-inspired.” He explains that his primary concerns when painting are “the careful selection of colors and the way they govern various geometrical shapes.” During Antreasian’s visits to Turkey, he became intrigued with Islamic art and architecture. He explains, “There’s a grandeur to the architecture there, the mosques, the Islamic hulks of architecture that embrace everything magical—the light through the windows, the carpets on the floor.” He continues, “My interests in the noble, the heroic, the monumental were reinforced as they were embodied in that architecture, and in other ways, as the kind of calligraphy called ‘Kufic’ that’s very architectural in its forms, very geometric.”
However abstract, Antreasian’s paintings and lithographs are pictorial memorials to his cultural past.
