Tufenkian Fine Arts is pleased to announce, Garo Antreasian: Abstract Geometries, a solo exhibition of paintings and prints by Garo Antreasian. This exhibition will feature work from three decades of the artist’s career, spanning from the 1980s through the 2000s. The exhibition will be on view from June 30 to July 29, 2023 with an artist reception to be held at the gallery on Saturday, July 15 from 4:00 PM to 7:00 PM.

Garo Antreasian is rightfully situated as one of the most influential pioneers of contemporary printmaking and painting of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Antreasian’s rhythmic architectural, geometric, and ornamental shapes and colors, synthesis of multiple visual and textual traditions, and subversion of distinct artistic categories all point to the breadth of his multifaceted and ambitious creative output. As a comprehensive representation of Antreasian’s oeuvre, Abstract Geometries, aims to provide a new avenue through which to explore the artist’s works.

In the 1960s, a time when lithography was a dying art, Antreasian helped pioneer the revival of lithography through the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which he co-founded in Los Angeles with June Wayne and Clinton Adams. Under Antreasian's guidance as the technical director, the Tamarind Lithography Workshop became a hub for artists, providing them with the necessary resources, expertise, and collaborative environment to explore lithography.

In 1982 Antreasian made a trip to the Near East in search of his Armenian roots which launched a crucial change in the artist’s practice. Heavily influenced by the intricate qualities of pattern and design in Islamic ornament and opened up to a new range of ethnic crafts, Antreasian began to paint on wood panels that he enhanced with balsa-wood strips to produce an array of rhythmic patterns in relief. The acutely organized and meticulously crafted artworks that Antreasian fashioned from inlaid laminated wood shows the artist tracking affinities in a range of artistic practices — Middle Eastern and Islamic tile- work and textiles traditions; the carved doors, tribal shields, and wicker mats of African iconography; and the monumental forms that evoke the ancient Mediterranean cultures.

Garo Antreasian (1922 – 2018) was an American printmaker and educator as well as a co-founder of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, California.

Committed to a geometric formal language since the mid-1960s, Antreasian spoke that language idiosyncratically, in a rich, modulated voice. Although his compositions can be forthright and simple, they never confront the eye with minimalist austerity. Rather, they brim with lovingly fashioned and rhythmically repeated detail. The works Antreasian fashioned from inlaid laminated wood reflect upon the exquisite craftsmanship of his sources, divorcing them from their functional origin. Similarly, his many works reliant on script - Arabic, Armenian, Latin - free line and contour from the rigors of verbal communication, allowing various alphabets to run free in a neo-Futurist “parole in libertà."