Anna Navasardian’s work utilizes the language of portraiture and the tradition of figure painting to obscure the bounds that separate personal and constructed identity. Dynamic subjects are drafted from sources that include Soviet era family photographs, vintage periodicals, and live models. The resulting characters expose hidden truths and buried layers narrated through vigorous brush strokes and an animated palette.
Navasardian develops themes of identity, adolescence, growth, and memory in creating compositions that explore the multilayered nature of reality. In her recent series, vibrant palette marks function as fleeting thoughts surrounding a family. The thoughts dissolve in and out of the physical environment, blending into the shrubbery at one point and melting into a woman’s dress pattern at another. In this way, Navasardian employs the visceral quality of paint to illuminate the invisible elements that surround us.
There is always strife - a dramatic inner state - in the faces of her characters. She likes her subjects to sit for lengthy sessions in order to create a neutral zone in which their personas dissolve. The resulting figures offer a sense of permanency, and a simplification of detail seems to reveal the subject’s purest form. Her life-size paintings feature intimate portrayals of adult and school-aged subjects whose individual personas are sublimated by their universality. Her paintings investigate the many layers of reality and deal with themes such as identity, puberty, growing up and memory.
Navasardian acknowledges German Expressionists, and Armenian artists like Arshile Gorky and Minas Avestisyan as influences - evident in the choice of her color palette and expressive brushwork.
Navasardian is a graduate of Carnegie Mellon. Selected solo exhibitions: "Gathering Layers", Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich; "Kids", Michael Janssen Singapore, Singapore; "Open" Gasser Grunert, New York; "Child", Artspace 105, Pittsburgh; etc.