Press
Selected reviews and press texts.
Holland Paper Biennial, 2010
Sam Grigorian: Calculated Happenstance
Frank van der Ploeg, art historian · Holland Paper Biennial, 2010
Collage dates from the early twentieth century. Two-dimensional art can no longer be imagined without it. It is tempting to compare the layered construction with the venerable principles of painting. Paper is to collage what paint is to painting. But the reverse is also possible: scratching, reducing, removing material once applied. When this technique is applied to a finished collage, the result is décollage.
Sam Grigorian, born in Yerevan in 1957 and resident in Berlin since 1992, works exclusively with this technique. He adheres paper to paper, then removes it again, layers new strata over it, removes again. What remains is a surface made entirely of layers of eroded time.
Works such as High was the Sky and Mauerpark (both 2006) have a scenic-geographic undertone, and not only because of their titles. The patchwork of the first recalls an aerial photograph of parcels of land; beneath the coloured strips of the second lies the diagrammatic representation of a park. A work such as Miles Davis gewidmet (2008) is more abstract, perhaps playing in style and title on a famous predecessor: Piet Mondrian, whose Victory Boogie Woogie was made with adhesive tape.
Grigorian's works show a surface that has calculated the accidental. The title of the exhibition, Calculated Happenstance, is exactly right: what appears as chance is the result of a long, patient practice of applying and removing.
Berliner Zeitung, 2017
A little inconceivability is necessary
Ingeborg Ruthe, art critic · Berliner Zeitung · Summer 2017
Accident and poetic abstraction become one. You look left and right, up and down. Forms emerge from the surface, or, like in Op Art, they submerge. Collages become décollages. Sam Grigorian's paintings are nearly minimalistic with a tendency to look like a relief. Horizontal lines bring structure into the clear, but enigmatic picture and create a magic-like order.
His medium is paper, preferably music paper, for he feels and thinks like a musician. By folding, bending, crushing, ripping and scratching it, by plastering it on canvas and painting over it, only to tear strips out of it again and thus reveal layer after layer, he creates a composition of lines. Horizontal, vertical or bulging lines. And there are fields of strong colours, but sometimes also in a more monochrome, black-and-white or light-and-dark palette.
Sam Grigorian is from Yerevan, an old, very traditional and ideologically marked culture. There he could not make progress as an artist and he was drawn to the modern West. Thus he found a kind of syncretism, magical, rich in contrast, but also harmonic: Grigorian's art searches for clearness, line, form, for the intellectual, for poetry. He manages to combine all this with a light and uninhibited hand.
Grigorian's Armenian roots become visible mainly in his special relation to paper which he expertly works before using it. In his décollages it serves as a multilayered base with diverse textures. Grigorian works the surface of the paper by opening it up with a specially developed technique and revealing deeper layers. Like a sculptor he cuts down the volume to reduce form and content to its essence. Enigmatic signs begin to appear: they look Armenian, Egyptian, East Asian or as drawn by children.
Sam Grigorian himself calls his working process between intention and intuition "Controlled accidents". His art seems to be abstract, but it is rooted in seeing, in the sensitive experience of his environment, and from hearing music. He translates the vocabulary of his view of the world and its sounds into his language of colours, lines, forms and cyphers. You will never be able to interpret them completely. A little rest of uncertainty has to remain.
Tufenkian Fine Arts, Los Angeles, 2018
Sam Grigorian @ 60
Asparez · March 2018
Tufenkian Fine Arts will present Sam Grigorian @ 60, a new exhibition featuring selected works by Sam Grigorian, March 23 – April 27, 2018. This will be Grigorian's second exhibition at Tufenkian Fine Arts; his solo debut at the gallery was held in 2015. A prolific painter based in Berlin, Grigorian has garnered critical acclaim for his extraordinary technical and thematic range. His work has been included in the prestigious Holland Paper Biennale in 2010, as well as Art Stage Singapore, Art Fair Köln, and the Melbourne Art Fair, including an impressive list of gallery and museum exhibitions throughout Europe, Australia, and California.
Grigorian's creations are renowned as much for their uniqueness, beauty, and understated elegance as for their conceptual scope. A key aspect of his work is a subtle reference to the unfolding of a journey, a certain stoical awareness of the passage of time. This is particularly at play in his works on paper, which, through an inferred appreciation and endorsement of re-use and re-appropriation of material, are an affirmation of life's cyclical nature.
Today, Grigorian's work has evolved into a singular expression of joy, of an ebullient receptivity in the face of the sorrows of the world. At 60, Grigorian is humble and refreshingly unassuming, a mirror image of his "Happiness" series. Teeming with vibrant colours and gleefully audacious compositions, the ecstatic geometricity of the paintings commands the attention of the viewer and leads to lush vistas of emotional resonance: an unmitigated celebration of the here and now.