Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to open the exhibition, Charles Garabedian, Mythical Realities, featuring recent paintings by the artist. This will be the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery, now in its new location at 15 Rivington Street, New York, NY. The artist will be present for an opening reception on Saturday, January 17th, from 5 – 7:30pm.

Mythical Realities is the combined title for the nine large works on paper that comprise this exhibition. Garabedian, a believer in the collective unconscious, has and continues to gravitate intuitively to imagery and narrative of his ancient Armenian ancestors. Here the scroll-like evolving narrative and the historic, sometimes horrific, imagery reveal his instinct. However the titles such as Family Affair, Now She Can't Curse Us, and You Should Have Looked at Me bring us up to the present.

Born in Detroit, MI in 1923, Charles Garabedian moved to California in his early teens. After serving in the United States Air Force during World War II, Garabedian received an undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California in 1950. He began painting at age 32 and decided to return to school to receive formal painting instruction from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned an MA in 1961.

He has shown regularly in New York and Los Angeles since the early 1970’s and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work can be seen in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. In 2011, Julie Joyce curated a comprehensive retrospective of Garabedian’s work at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in Santa Barbara, CA.