National Gallery of Armenia

 The National Gallery of Armenia is proud to present the first retrospective exhibition of poster art by one of the eminent figures of Armenian contemporary art and design, Kamo Nigarian (1950-2011).
Organized by Tech Degh Theatre, in collaboration with the Goethe Centre in Yerevan, the exhibition  “Paper Mines” gives a complete overview of Nigarian's development as a #poster_designer between the 1970s and 2000s. Tackling political, theatrical, exhibitionary and film topics, Nigarian went far beyond the illustrative and didactic approaches that typified attitudes to posters in the USSR and Armenia. Under the influence of 1960s Polish, Cuban and East-German graphic art, the artist melded expressionist, surrealist and minimalist styles with highly conceptual uses of typography, in order to create a stylistically distinct vision of 'critical' poster art.
However, the aesthetically disturbing and intellectually provocative tone of Nigarian's surreal posters was rejected by the Soviet-Armenian art establishment and, as a result, only a handful of the artist's poster projects were ever printed. From 1981 onwards Nigarian mostly turned to painting and photography, and it was only late in life that he was able to fully realize his conceptual approaches in graphic design in a series of posters made for  the National Gallery's film screening program.
These stirring images consolidated Nigarian's post-modern aesthetics into a visual language that shows the significance of this medium as an art form and reveals the existence of previously unacknowledged diversity of experimental approaches in contemporary Armenian design. In recent years, the rediscovery of Nigarian's work has served as an important source of inspiration for younger generations of Armenian graphic artists, leading to a renaissance of poster art in Armenia.
Exhibition curator: Vigen Galstyan (PhD)