{"id":10969,"date":"2025-07-26T19:52:00","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T19:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ica.am\/?post_type=projects&#038;p=10969"},"modified":"2026-05-04T20:11:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:11:51","slug":"grigor-khachatryan-my-contemporary","status":"publish","type":"projects","link":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/projects\/grigor-khachatryan-my-contemporary\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cGrigor Khachatryan and his Contemporaries\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The exhibition could have easily been titled \u201cThree and a Half Decades Later\u201d, \u201cReturn to Painting\u201d, or some other resonant and historical name. It could have been \u2014 if it weren\u2019t for the newly created stamp artwork that defines the portrait series \u201cGrigor Khachatryan: My Contemporary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Leaving its red imprint equally on each portrait, the stamp seems to \u201cdisregard\u201d the precision of the depicted individual\u2019s facial features. It ignores them, only to later emphasize the shared essence through the Russian text enclosed in a rectangular frame: \u201c\u0423\u041c, \u0427\u0415\u0421\u0422\u042c \u0418 \u0421\u041e\u0412\u0415\u0421\u0422\u042c \u041d\u0410\u0428\u0415\u0419 \u042d\u041f\u041e\u0425\u0418\u201d (\u201cIntellect, Honor, and Conscience of Our Era\u201d). This stamp highlights the fact that all these individuals \u2014 by virtue of being Grigor Khachatryan\u2019s contemporaries \u2014 belong to the same era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The ironic use of one of the Soviet era\u2019s most grandiloquent slogans unmistakably hints at the time period in question, and at the people who once had the \u201cfortune\u201d of encountering this quote \u2014 originally used to describe the Communist Party of V. I. Lenin \u2014 everywhere.That is why any notion of a literal \u201creturn to painting\u201d in this portrait series must be taken only in a conditional sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In line with his diverse performative practices, this series \u2014 seen as a kind of artistic performance \u2014 might even be compared to a unique form of human resource management (HRM), executed through painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It might be, were it not for the artist\u2019s own ironic declaration made decades ago in his Manifesto, in which he claimed that not only is he, Grigor Khachatryan, not a human being, but neither are his contemporaries. And of course, were it not for the sadness that permeates this final irony by Grigor Khachatryan \u2014 sadness born from the very act of counting his contemporaries one by one through portraiture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2014 Nazareth Karoyan<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" height=\"16\" width=\"16\" alt=\"\ud83d\udcc6\" src=\"https:\/\/static.xx.fbcdn.net\/images\/emoji.php\/v9\/tff\/1\/16\/1f4c6.png\">&nbsp;Exhibition curator: Nazareth Karoyan<br>Exhibition architect: Ruben Arevshatyan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The exhibition could have easily been titled \u201cThree and a Half Decades Later\u201d, \u201cReturn to Painting\u201d, or some other resonant and historical name. It could have been \u2014 if it weren\u2019t for the newly created stamp artwork that defines the portrait series \u201cGrigor Khachatryan: My Contemporary.\u201d Leaving its red imprint equally on each portrait, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10970,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","_eb_attr":""},"projects_categoria":[173],"class_list":["post-10969","projects","type-projects","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","projects_categoria-exhibitions"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/10969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/projects"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/10969\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11000,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects\/10969\/revisions\/11000"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"projects_categoria","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ica.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/projects_categoria?post=10969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}