Curator of the exhibition:
Vigen Galstyan

The National Gallery of Armenia is happy to present the exhibition Davit Kochunts: History Pictures, the second project of the Prospectations program devoted to showcasing the work of young contemporary artists. Known for paintings that reflect the socio-political and cultural tensions of contemporary Armenia, Kochunts (b. 1988) posits a simple but urgent question with his latest series: what can history painting be today, in a world where history itself is an unstable and fragmented phenomenon experienced through screens?

Based on documentary photographs and screenshots, History Pictures combines portraits of international figures – such as Luis Buñuel, Michel Foucault and Andrei Sakharov – with images pertaining to Armenia's recent conflicts, the funeral of Merlyn Monroe, social media influencers, criminals and robots. The sequence of these unrelated subjects mimic the irrational flow of an Instagram feed, where the heroic and the trivial collide and the past blends with the present.

Painted in a muted, Impressionistic manner, the works feel like fleeting impressions fading as quickly as they appear. Instead of asserting undeniable historical events, Kochunts shows history as a vision of unreliable memories, elusive narratives and digital fragments that constantly transforms at different moments in time. Painting can anchor these flickering moments in reality, attaining a renewed significance as a threshold between the historiographic hallucination and the anxieties and desires of our present reality.