North of Tijuana

Orange County Fine Arts Showcase Gallery in South Coast Plaza Village presents a new exhibition, “North of Tijuana”. The show features the work of Armenian sculptor/painter Vartan Ohanian with 20 other OCFA member artists.

International artist Vartan is a sculptor who combines iron forging with art and has further extended his talents as an award-winning painter. In this show Vartan presents a very unique assemblage with musical instruments, iron, wood, oil paintings, statues and metallurgical works.

 A Los Angeles critic states the following about Vartan’s 3-D work, “Realizing aesthetic form from an amorphous mass whether that may be in the form of raw marble, iron, or wood exhorts the genius of the artist.” After heating varying sized pieces of raw iron, Vartan then sculpts, carves, and chisels the fragments into aesthetic forms patterned after his informal sketches. As the critic aptly concludes, within his creation the Vartan’s character reveals itself and “in the process the artist discovers himself and unfolds his artistic genius to the world.”

After graduating from Terlemezian Art School in Armenia, he continued postgraduate studies for two years at the Fine Arts and Theatre Institute of Yerevan.  He broadened his training by studying metallurgic craftsmanship at the Estonian State Institute of Fine Arts.  He fashioned a monumental memorial to the Armenian struggle for liberation as the central ornament to a square in Yerevan., designed the doors and lighting fixtures for the Club of Journalists, created and sculpted a 75-foot chandelier that spans from the first to the top floor of the Lenstromyprom-proekt an architectural building in St. Petersburg.  One of his most recent shows in the United States was “The Jazz Artist” at the Millard Sheets Art Center.

We invite you to come to our reception and meet this remarkable artist.  There will be refreshments and music by a popular jazz duo.

We have added a special mural event for the show. During the August 13 reception, participating artists will draw, paint and collage on a paper scroll (approx. 3.5′ X 20′) to create a mural of diverse abstract and realistic imagery. It will be fun to see the progress of this. Gallery artists will add to the imagery during the run of the show.  The completed mural will then be cut up into various smaller sizes, matted, and presented for auction at the next art show reception at Showcase Gallery on September 24.