Alexandre Gallery is pleased to present Varujan Boghosian: A Selection, an exhibition of select assemblages from the artist’s personal collection.

Sculptor, assembler, constructionist, builder – beachcomber, scavenger, collector, historian, conservator – Varujan Boghosian’s work is inspired by the past, by an appreciation of the lives and legacy of myth, of people and objects that have gone before, and a love of the images and iconography that lasts. He gathers the relics of our common experience, and transformed by imagination, they become poetic tributes.

In his assemblages, Boghosian incorporates found objects, such as books, toys, cards and tools from antique shops and flea markets. He employs strategies of construction and deconstruction to recontexualize the castoff materials in his work. His approach is intuitive and meditative, drawing inspiration from a plurality of sources including literature, mythology, art history and music. Allusions to Greek myths feature prominently in his work. He also draws inspiration from Surrealist traditions that contemplate the boundaries between dream and reality. The artist “uses visual elements of light and dark, color and mass, line and form to expose new possibilities in the relationship between continuity and change, fact and fiction, reality and fantasy,” writes Robert M. Doty, curator of Boghosian’s 1989 retrospective exhibition at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College.

Boghosian was born in New Britain, Connecticut in 1926. His father emigrated from Armenia and was a cobbler, before going to work in the Stanley Tool Works. Boghosian joined the Navy during WWII and returned home in 1946 to enter the local teachers’ training college. He soon changed his plans and entered the Vesper George School of Art in Boston. In 1953 he received a Fulbright Grant for painting in Italy. When he returned, he became a student of Joseph Albers at Yale School of Art and Architecture.

Boghosian has held teaching positions at the University of Florida, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Yale, Brown, and since 1968, at Dartmouth, from where he recently retired. He has received awards from the American Academy in Rome, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, among others, and has been elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.