Armine Tumanyan Biography
Armine Tumanyan is a contemporary Armenian artist whose works delve into the profound connection between humanity and the natural world. Her practice transcends visual aesthetics, aiming to manifest intangible elements such as sound and sensibility, offering a contemplative exploration of our collective human existence.
Born in 1975 in Yerevan, Armenia, Armine Tumanyan’s artistic journey began with a deep respect for nature and Armenian mythology. However, she soon felt traditional representation limited her ability to capture the essence of unseen forces. Shifting to abstraction, Tumanyan’s paintings became a canvas for emotions explored through a symphony of texture and colour which were better able to capture these invisible realities. Her fascination with materiality is evident in her tactile applications of paint, creating a multi-sensory experience that further blurs the line between the artwork and the world it reflects.
Armine Tumanyan doesn’t shy away from the challenges we face; rather, she invites us to contemplate our place within the natural world and our responsibility towards it. Ultimately, her art is a socio-ecological call to reconnect – with nature, with ourselves, and with the unseen threads that bind us all.
Tumanyan received her artistic training from the Department of Fine Arts of the Armenian State
Pedagogical University followed by a Masters Degree in Fashion Design and Design at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia. Her artistic journey, starting later in life with her children by her side, highlighting her dedication as a prominent female figure in Armenia’s art scene as artist, curator and a mother. She has exhibited and worked widely in Armenia and abroad with important exhibitions in Yerevan, Monzon, Marseille, Kiev, Taipei, Toronto, Paris, Barcelona, Jerusalem, Chisinau and Moscow.
Armine Tumanyan, born in 1975 in Yerevan, is a multi-disciplinary contemporary artist who’s career has covered painting, batik, fashion and jewellery design. Her background in applied arts has materialised a haptic approach to painting, as each of her brushstrokes carry with them the dimensional explorations she addressed in her works in both silver and silk. The expression of her works is through this unwinding combination of her learnt techniques and unique artistic voice.
She has developed a rich painterly oeuvre that operates in the space between pure abstraction and formal representation of invisible realities. Finding her early artistic inspiration in Armenian civilisation, she delved into mythology as an allegory for reality and expressionism. An evolution of her practice from figurative to non-objective abstraction has played a key role. Not only a formal, but also an emotional abstraction has occurred, where the artists unseen feelings and senses have been broken up only to be presented back together again on canvas, in a new visible format.
Tumanyan explores these visibly invisible spaces as a means of making the inexplicable explicable. There is a symbolic exchange here between materiality and nothingness as her thick paste-like applications of paint combined with the use of mixed media and recycled materials evoke a power of undeniable presence. Rather than a purely optical matter, the artist understands painting as the manifestation of intangibles such as sound, sensibility and connectivity to the self and to nature. Her work thus continues to draw its inspiration from the natural world and its environmental preservation; from all which is to us “God given” and as the artist states, by many of us, taken for granted.
Tumanyan’s most significant body of work, “The Invisible Visible” explores these topics through pictorial sound-investigations using the teachings of German physicist Ernst Chladni. Within a series of 12 paintings the perception of sound is challenged to expand the vocal notions we grab onto, and instead we are invited to the deeply moving abstract canvas of Tumanyan. As poet Mher Arshakyan put it, “In the foreground of Armine Tumanyan’s abstract paintings lays the artistry of colours. Even if the entire canvas is a “theatre of one colour”, she plays an unacknowledged episode in your world and dictates some kind of lacking isolation, saving you from being stuck in time.” Her latest body of work will further expand on our notions of invisible realities as Tumanyan takes to the natural elements of water, earth, fire, metal and wood; investigating not their physical manifestations but rather their conceptual depths as essential components to our fragile human existence.
Tumanyan received her artistic training from the Department of Fine Arts of the Armenian State
Pedagogical University followed by a Masters Degree in Fashion Design and Design at the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia. Her strong female position as an artist in a post-soviet country has proven to her dedication in her practice and vision. Starting her artistic career at a later stage in life, her two children became an integral part of her artistic development and practice, accompanying her throughout the years. Tumanyan has for many years also worked as a prominent artistic coordinator in Armenia; curating, moderating and organising artistic exhibitions, discussions and events for both Armenian and international artists within Armenia and abroad. Tumanyan is a notable member of the Artists’ Union of Armenia and was the Head of the Tavush Branch and the director of the Tavush Spiritual Revival Foundation. Notable curatorial projects also include the founding of “ArtAm Gallery” platform at Zvartnots Airport in Yerevan.