Focus On | Talar Aghbashian

Everything is painted, everything everywhere.

My landscapes slowly transition. I catch myself painting figures. As I start from a structure, a shape that can stand or be. A monster? A transient vampire, that lives through the times, where bits of landscape gets stuck to these character-structures, in some cases the bits of landscape take over, and it -the landscape, becomes the subject; still, like it’s figure counterparts being as much a living breathing thing, as it indeed is! So far removed we are from the living-landscape that we would otherwise miss. The painting looks at you and we want to peer back.

The set like framing of the works points to the space within the frame, to this transient space. As the painting pulls together, and I help it on its legs, and see it revealed. The bunching-of-stuff process helps the painting have a flow and movement, whisked in time, mirroring the ephemerality of life, of all beings and non-beings alike, of eroding cultures and lands, of places I know and never knew.

Speedy drawing lines imbue freedom to the painting, it is an integral part of it. The harder cartoon-like outlines accent the forms, renders it ironical, witty, whilst stripping it down, and amplifying, it lends it a reality that is told in the way of painting."  

Aghbashian is primarily a painter, her works explore the human intervention within the landscape. Where her approach to both, painting and landscape is from a place of discovery. Her paintings, explore the human relationship to the landscape, and the projection of one onto the other. Talar Aghbashian graduated from the Lebanese University of Fine Arts (BA) 1999-2003, Central St. Martins College of Art and Design London (MA) 2007-2008, and Birkbeck University of London 2009-2010. She was a recipient of AGBU grant NY, and Benlian Trust grant London, 2007-2008. Aghbashian has taught at different schools, and MUT University in Lebanon 2003-2007, and has worked as a curator at the NHM and the V&A Museums London 2009-2010.