Michael Janssen Singapore is pleased to announce its first exhibition by young painter Anna Navasardian.

Anna Navasardian was born in Armenia and moved to the United States with her family at an early age. A graduate from the Carnegie Mellon College of Fine Arts, Navasardian paints people on large canvases. Digging into the nature of her sitters, she does not only describe the physical attributes of people but also seem to illuminate a moment of their nature.

There is always strife – a dramatic inner state - in the faces of her characters. She likes her subjects to sit for lengthy sessions in order to create a neutral zone in which their personas dissolve. The resulting figures offer a sense of permanency, and a simplification of detail seems to reveal the subject’s purest form.

Her life-size paintings feature intimate portrayals of adult and school-aged subjects whose individual personas are sublimated by their universality. Her paintings investigate the many layers of reality and deal with themes such as identity, puberty, growing up and memory. By using the raw, inherent qualities of paint her oeuvre illuminates the invisible things that surround us and make the boundaries that separate personal and constructed identities unrecognizable.

Some of the works on view in the exhibition are from her ‘Kids’ series. For it Navasardian used old class pictures to expose the rigid and unnatural scenarios forced upon the youth. It addresses questions of memory and the recollection of how people remember themselves as children.

Navasardian acknoledges German Expressionists, and Armenian artists like Arshile Gorky and Minas Avestisyan as influences – evident in the choice of her color pallete and expressive brushwork.

Anna Navasrdian: b. 1988 in Yerevan, Armenia. Lives and works in New York City.

Selected solo exhibitions: 2013: Michael Janssen Singapore. 2012: Galerie Andreas Binder, Munich, Germany. 2011: Gasser Grunert, New York NY.