ARTINERARY: December 2025

2026-01-25 - 21:06

The steely smog-lined December sky has increasingly become a perennial feature of the capital, slowly throttling denizens’ spirits like a Faustian cloak. Deprived of its sun, Yerevan can feel much like the horrifying Upside Down from Netflix’s Stranger Things, and the people often appear to be possessed by some dark force that draws them toward oblivion. It’s something of a lifeline then that the city’s cultural institutions continue to organize as many events as they do, despite the customary perception of December as the “dead-end” month. These occasions are like portals into a different, better dimension, filled with light, spirit and meaning that allow one to find flashes of hope and beauty within the mundane bleakness of the surrounding reality. All the more reason, then, to turn December into one of the cultural flagpoles of the year. Without many other avenues for “escape”, this should really be a time when the essential social functions of the arts, as a catalyst for togetherness, intellectual enlightenment and spiritual reinforcement, come to the fore. All of the cultural platforms in the city (as well as across the country) should really rethink December’s depressing climate as an opportunity to draw the public inside, toward spaces filled with engaging and inspiring content, providing a reprieve from the exhausting “holiday” rush and a means to reflect upon times past and times to come. Of course, once they’ve worked on that engaging and inspiring part a bit more. EXHIBITIONS FROM VAN TO PARIS: HOVHANNES ALHAZIAN If you are yearning for light and warmth as the gloomy December days inch forward to yet another year of 21st century uncertainty, then the National Gallery’s retrospective of the great, yet under-recognized French-Armenian painter Ohannes Alhazian is the ticket for you. Born in Van in 1881, Alhazian moved to Tbilisi as a teenager where he received his initial art training, prior to relocating to Paris in the early 1900s. Entering the world’s art capital on the cusp of the great avant-garde boom, the young Armenian painter followed in the footsteps of most of his compatriots: he went after the safety net of restrained modernism, avoiding any radical, experimental gestures. Cleverly mixing stylistic techniques borrowed from impressionist and post-impressionist trends, Alhazian soon arrived at a very palatable and distinctive style that made him one of the more successful Armenian artists in Europe at the time. Consisting primarily of landscapes, interiors and still-lifes, Alhazian’s oeuvre represents a romantic and patently nostalgic worldview. Nature in its different states is seen as an idealized harmony of elements, while the cultural imprint of humanity is shown exclusively through the prism of a quaint, traditional lifestyle. Modernity presents itself largely via Alhazian’s use of sparkling primary colors and the controlled expressiveness of his squarish brushstrokes, which he implemented with such technical brilliance that his paintings often seem to radiate light. The artist would stick to this modality for the rest of his long career, finding it unnecessary to adjust his commercially solid approach. A few years after his death in 1958, Alhazian’s heirs generously donated the entire contents of the artist’s studio to the State Gallery of Armenia. This vast collection of over 200 works has never been properly shown until now, and the classically structured exhibition curated by Margarita Khachatryan finally gives us an opportunity to rediscover the full creative path of the master in all its luminous glory. Exhibition: “From Van to Paris”, Hovhannes Alhazian Where: National Gallery of Armenia 1 Aram Str., Yerevan Dates: Open from October 28 STREAMS OF MODERNISM: DIASPORAN-ARMENIAN ART BEYOND THE IRON CURTAIN The sustained attention on the legacies of diasporan art is one of the more welcome recent developments at the National Gallery of Armenia. Following the first retrospective shows of Jean Jansem and Ohannes Alhazian this year, the Gallery presents one of its more thematically complex and rich exhibitions, which explores the fascinating links between the diasporan art scene and Soviet Armenia during the height of the Cold War in 1940s-1960s. Including some 100 works by close to 40 artists, Streams of Modernism posits a critically under-explored question about the degree to which diasporan art was present in Soviet Armenia and its impact on the formation of the local art scene in the mid-20th century. Divided into three historical sections, the exhibition presents compelling evidence about the influx of artworks and ideas that were considered an anathema to the precepts of Soviet socialist art. From the first waves of repatriate artists in 1946-1947 to the “flood” of exhibitions of diasporan art in the 1960s, the links between Soviet Armenia and its amorphous cultural “double” provide a much broader and intricate matrix for rethinking the definitions of Armenian modernism. The exposure to various strands of formalist art via the works of Yervand Kotchar, Hakob Gurjian, Petros Konturadjian, Melkon Kebabjian, Gerardo Orakian, Ashod Zorian, Hagop Hagopian, Paul Guiragossian, Carzou, Elvir Jean and many others, undoubtedly served as a vital window (however narrow) into the horizons of free artistic expression under the stifling demands of ideological dictatorship. Aside from triggering these revisionist questions, the exhibition also serves as an invaluable opportunity to rediscover the astonishing diversity and visual splendour of diasporan modernist art, much of which remains little known to local viewers. Exhibition: “Streams of Modernism: Diasporan-Armenian Art Beyond The Iron Curtain” Where: National Gallery of Armenia 1 Aram Str., Yerevan Dates: Open from November 26 SOUNDING IMAGES: GRIGOR AGHASYAN The National Gallery is hosting another show that represents the more familiar side of 20th century post-war Armenian art. The retrospective of one of the most respected academic painters of this period, Grigor Aghasyan (1926-2009) shows a broad and multifaceted trajectory of an artist usually associated with socialist-realism and historicist narrativism. Throughout his career, Aghasyan successfully interpreted the pulse of officially-sanctioned culture, going from the early, large-scale propagandistic compositions depicting the proletariat and urbanization to the equally monumental canvases celebrating the national reawakening of the 1960s, and the intimate, memory-pictures of disappearing old Yerevan. What is particularly fascinating about this show – curated by the artist’s grand-daughter and the Gallery’s director, Marina Hakobyan – is the way it reveals the eclectic and unstable nature of socialist art. Aghasyan was a master at adapting a plethora of stylistic trends, from loose impressionist techniques and dramatic neo-realism to symbolism and baroque expressionism, into a vision that always strives for classicism, yet is in an anxious search for renewal. What remains constant here is Aghasyan’s earnest interest in people, communities, family, place and storytelling. His brilliance at conveying mood and narrative often achieves an almost cinematic effect that has a visceral impact even today. It’s the type of wholesome, humanist sensibility that was already archaic in mid-century Western art and could be dismissed merely as tastefully naïve populism. Yet, much like Norman Rockwell’s work, the uncanny magnetism of such art has become even more powerful in our apathetic and alienated times, pushing us to rethink the legacies of these academic masters in a new light. Exhibition: “Sounding Pictures”, Grigor Aghasyan Where: National Gallery of Armenia 1 Aram Str., Yerevan Dates: Open from December 12 KNARIK VARDANYAN: TIME, SPACE, MOTION When it comes to defining who, or what, qualifies as a “classic,” social, political and cultural forces tend to outweigh any intrinsic measure of artistic merit or historical significance. The case of painter Knarik Vardanyan (1914–1996) is telling. Little known beyond a small circle of specialists and collectors, her obscurity feels perplexing when confronted with the astonishingly bold and fearlessly experimental vision revealed in her long-overdue retrospective, curated by Armen Yesayants at the Cafesjian Center for the Arts. Surveying Vardanyan’s trajectory from early Fauvist-inflected works to the quasi-abstract paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, this strident exhibition leaves little doubt that she ranks among the true originals of late-modernist Soviet Armenian art. Few of her contemporaries approached the formal or thematic freedom she achieved through her unrestrained use of color and line—at times so intense it borders on the hallucinatory. Drawing on the Soviet avant-garde and Italian Futurism of the 1920s, her work is nonetheless infused with a distinctly “space-age” emotiveness and fantasy that is entirely her own. This futurist, cosmopolitan orientation goes a long way in explaining her marginalization. While many of her peers turned toward idealized narratives of national past and identity, Vardanyan remained committed to contemporary and forward-looking subjects. Her techno-futurist world of sublime, unsettling forces stood in stark contrast to the “timeless”, ethno-nationalist idioms that dominated the 1960s. It was also profoundly at odds with expectations placed on women artists: her painting was bluntly “unfeminine” in its aggression and lack of decorum. Ignored by both institutional and unofficial factions of a patriarchal art world, Vardanyan never received the recognition she deserved. This exhibition should act as a catalyst for the overdue reassessment of her mercurial legacy—and of many other compelling figures who have slipped through the cracks of Armenian art history. Exhibition: “Time, Space, Motion”, Knarik Vardanyan Where: Cafesjian Center for the Arts (Cascade Complex) 10 Tamanyan Str., Yerevan Dates: December 12-March 7 IN UNISON THROUGH ART: YERVAND AND MÉLINÉ KOCHAR The Giotto Studio-Museum presents another long-overlooked woman artist finally receiving a spotlight, more than 60 years after her death. Méliné Kochar (Ohanian) has long existed as a marginal footnote to the towering reputation of her husband, the avant-garde painter and sculptor Yervand Kochar. When the two met in the late-1920s Paris, Kochar was already a rising star of the European art scene, known for his radical surrealist compositions and pioneering three-dimensional paintings. Méliné, then a young student of Fernand Léger, entered his orbit at a moment when Kochar’s grief (due to loss of his first wife and child), charisma, and intellectual intensity made him irresistible. They married in 1930, becoming a celebrated couple within Paris’s diasporic circles. Their partnership ended abruptly in 1936 when Kochar relocated to Soviet Armenia. Méliné was meant to follow, but they never reunited. She remained in Paris for the rest of her life, emotionally tethered to an absent husband while attempting to forge her own artistic path. Her work reflects