Visual Language Magazine Contemporary Fine Art Vol 3 No 6

VL
Studio Visit
Tigran
Reflection in the Age of Technology
“People are my landscape,” contemporary artist
Tigran Tsitoghdzyan explains. “I’m just an observer.
I love being lost in the crowd and feeling
anonymous.”
Yet, Tsitoghdzyan—who goes by Tigran professionally—found
himself set apart from the crowd
at an early age in his native Armenia. Henrik Iguitan,
founder and director of both the Modern
Art Museum and Children’s Art Museum based
in Yerevan, hand-picked ten-year-old Tigran to
star in a solo exhibit featuring over 100 of his
paintings. Tigran doesn’t make too much of his
impressive start. “For me it was normal. My
class came to the exhibit with my art teacher.
She told me I could do better.” Tigran humbly
jokes, “I actually had really bad grades in that
art class.”
Tigran grew up surrounded by intellectuals. He
painted in his parent’s living room, listening to
their friends talk politics, philosophy and music.
He credits his parents with his down-to-earth attitude
about his early success; they didn’t show
him articles about his first show or subsequent
European and American openings until he was
twenty-two. As a result of this no-nonsense attitude,
Tigran says, “I never felt that I was different
than anyone else. It was just that I liked to
paint.”
Perhaps this insistence on anonymity and normality
prompted Tigran to leave behind the acclaim
of his home country in 1998 and study in
Europe as a young man. While he found success
there, New York had been on his mind since a
visit at age fourteen for an exhibition of his work.
“At that point in the Soviet Union we didn’t know
much about foreign countries in general—going
to New York was like going to Mars. I couldn’t
find a Guns ‘N Roses CD at home and then I
came to New York for that trip and was front row
at a Guns ‘N Roses concert. I was talking about
New York nonstop after that.”
Mirror Series
wwwttigran.com
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