“Art is capable of sublimating everything, war, crime, shame, sickness and total hell”
Born in 1972, Annie Kurkdjian had to endure sixteen years of civil war within her homeland, Beirut, Lebanon. Her childhood was marked by the noise of bombs, terror, permanent insecurity and the inconsistency of ordinary things. Originally Armenian, Kurkdjian has previously faced the traumatism of the Armenian genocide through the history of her grandmother.
Kurkdjian paintings are sober and at the same time powerful, they portray beings in tortured postures, monstrous, grotesque. Sometimes they fixate on the beholder, with a numb eye and vaulted shoulders, as if harassed or lost. The subject of the works appear to be dissected and analyzed. They form shivery and poignant images. These big canvases breathing tragedy interrogate us about life itself, and compel the viewer to contemplate the process of creation.