In the seventh installment of our ongoing series of exhibitions focused on printmaking in the Arab world (Arab Print VII), Meem Gallery presents fifteen etchings by Lebanese-Armenian artist, Assadour. This exhibition serves as a testimony to his remarkable career in printmaking and engraving. Assadour's captivating artworks reflect his own heritage and tumultuous upbringing. His seamless blending of these elements have led him to create a new and imaginary world, one in which he addresses themes of identity, memory, loss, alienation and the human experience.
Assadour Bezdikian was born in the suburbs of Bourj Hammoud, Beirut in 1943 to a family with Armenian roots. He grew up amidst the vibrantly diverse and culturally rich environment of the Lebanese capital, being exposed to a myriad of artistic influences that would shape his distinctive style. Assadour was always an outsider, given his rebellious personality, he wasn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. As Lebanese art critic Joseph Tarrab, pointed out in his essay, “…Assadour’s art seeks to put us in unfamiliar territory, to destabilize and disconcert, and to induce perplexity in us.”
At age 18, Assadour travelled to Italy to study engraving and painting at the Pietro Vanucci Academy in Perugia after he was granted a scholarship by the Italian Cultural Centre in Beirut, where he was taught by the Lebanese artist Jean Khalifé. It was in Perugia, where he started to make his first engravings under the apprenticeship of a local Franciscan priest named Father Diego. Taking advantage of his time in Italy, he also visited Florence and San Gimignano where he saw the works of Italian Renaissance masters like Giotto, Uccello and Cimabue.
In 1964, Assadour won an art competition organized by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture which granted him a three-year scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. He trained under the French artist Lucien Coutaud, a central figure in the artist’s journey. Paris, often referred to as the “City of Art”, had a profound and transformative effect on Assadour’s approach to printmaking. In Assadour’s own words, “I chose printmaking, because I liked the etching process. When you are printing, you need to be serious and disciplined, because it is a long and arduous experience. On the one hand, I am very logical, on the other, I am very lyrical. I need both of these aspects, which is never easy for a contradictory personality.” (Osthaus Museum Hagen Publication, My Little Story, Assadour, 2022).
Assadour was inducted into a number of prestigious French organizations during the 1970’s, including the Salon de Mai de Paris (1974-1977), La Jeune Gravure Contemporaine (1975-1979) and has been a member of Les Peintres-Graveurs Français since 1975. He started to win awards and medals for his participation in competitions including the Gold Medal at the Terza Biennale Internazionale Della Grafica d'Arte, Florence (1972) and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris (1984) as well as holding solo exhibitions across Europe. Triangle lunaire (Lunar Triangle) etched in 1976, is reflective of the artist’s mature abilities as a printmaker. By incorporating symbolic imagery, fragmented landscapes and layered textures, he skillfully combines elements of realism and abstraction, blurring between the physical and metaphysical realms. His use and orchestrated interplay of numbers, letters, lines and shapes construct a particular visual language that moves the narrative of his geometric world. “My subject-matter is obsession with and fear of time; everything that has to do with time - the numbers, the fragments, even the titles (“18h01”) - is bound to time and its passage.”, he explains. (Osthaus Museum Hagen Publication, My Little Story, Assadour, 2022).
In the 1980’s, Assadour embraced a more abstract and conceptual approach to his artworks, moving away from the use of specific titles. This was a deliberate choice to invite a broader range of interpretations and engage the viewer in a more personal and introspective dialogue, but also to barricade the artist’s own personal traumas. Works that had titles like “The Disjointed Doll” or “No Man’s Land”,became “Figure” and “Difficulty in Finding a Title”. In Géométries (1985/87), his focus on the abstracted landscape is evident by the structuring and grouping of different elements and motifs that he commonly applies such as the stranded letters or cosmological patterns that make up the “Assadourian” universe. Assadour extended his practice beyond the use of copper plates and canvases, as his compositions found their way onto the covers and pages of books written by renowned authors and poets, such as his collaboration with Syrian poet Adonis.
During this period, Assadour's peculiar expression garnered significant acclaim and recognition. His artworks resonated with collectors and museums alike, leading to his work being acquired and exhibited by key institutions in Europe and the Arab world, such as the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, the National Museum of Warsaw in Poland, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Art in Doha, the Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut and the Sursock Museum in Beirut, where the latter honored him with a major retrospective in 2016. Recent shows include another career-spanning retrospective at the esteemed Osthaus Museum Hagen in Germany.
Assadour lives and works in Paris.
Written by Shad Abdulkarim
2023
