Until 9 September 2023, Meem Gallery is hosting renowned Lebanese-Armenian artist Assadour Bezdikian’s solo show which features his fifteen etchings. Celebrating his outstanding career in printmaking and engraving, the exhibition sheds light on his ability to incorporate his heritage and troubled upbringing into eye-catching art pieces.
Assadour’s cryptic visual language is based on geometry. Full of symbolism, his art pieces feature measuring scales, arrows, cylinders, triangles, and other similar objects as well as numbers, letters, and coordinates. Many of the artist’s works depict puppet-like human figures surrounded by fragmented landscapes: the composition is built with lines and shapes. The latter often include arches, domes, cubes, and pyramids, and thus refer to architecture. Such a constructivist approach is the result of Assadour’s wish to bring some order to the world’s chaos, like the one he experienced back in Beirut, his hometown, and just like the disorder he still sees today.
Paper size: 51.2 x 32.7 cm. Image size: 31.2 x 11.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
It should be said that the game of opposites is a crucial element of Assadour’s art. Apart from order and chaos, the other opposites present in the artist’s works are, for example, construction and destruction, lightness and darkness, optimism and pessimism, and desert and city.
About the artist
Assadour Bezdikian (b. 1943, Beirut, Lebanon), known just as Assadour, resides in Paris. Although he is a master engraver, his art practice also involves working in oil, watercolour, and gouache to create paintings and drawings on paper and canvas. In his artworks presenting “the fusion of science and fiction” or “an imposition of the rational to fix the irrational”, he delves into such subjects as identity, memory, loss, alienation, and the human experience.
Interested in art, the young Assadour joined Lebanese painter Guvder’s art studio and later enrolled at the Italian Cultural Center in Beirut. There, he was taught art by Lebanese painter Jean Khalife. When he was 18, Assadour went to Perugia, Italy, to study engraving and painting at the Pietro Vanucci Academy. In 1964, after winning the competition organised by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, he received a three-year scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where Lucien Coutaud, a French surrealist engraver and painter, was his supervisor.
Paper size: 49.5 x 32 cm. Image size: 31.2 x 11.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
The artist has displayed his works in multiple exhibitions, including the Norwegian International Print Triennial (Fredrikstad, Norway, 1999); Art Biennial of Alcoi (Spain, 1998); 4th Biennial of Graphic Art (Belgrade, Serbia, 1997); International Biennial of Engraving (Kraków, Poland, 1991); Vico Arte 90, 2nd International Biennial of Graphic Art (Bamberino Val d’Elsa, Italy, 1990); and many others. Among the prestigious venues where he has held his solo shows are the Galerie La Pochade (1971), Galerie Sagot-le-Game (1977, 1983), Galerie du Dragon (1986) and Galerie Faris at the FIAC (1986) in Paris as well as Galleria L’Arco (1980) and Galleria II Millennio in Rome.
Assadour has been granted a plethora of international awards and prizes, such as the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris (1984); the Museum of Modern Art Award (Ljubljana, Yugoslavia, 1983); Honourable Mention at the Norwegian International Print Biennale (Fredrikstad, Norway, 1980); and many others. His art pieces can be found in Moonshine Museum (Seoul, South Korea); Victoria & Albert Museum (London, UK); CCCPL (Reggio Emilia, Italy); National Museum of Silesia (Poland); Centre de la Gravure et de l’Image imprimée (France); and other museums and art institutions across the globe.
To learn more about the current exhibition at Meem Gallery, please visit its official web page.
You may also be interested in visiting Empty Spaces at the ArtBooth gallery.
