Varujan Boghosian: Late Work Construction & Collage

Varujan Boghosian’s exhibition at BigTown Gallery is a post-modern tour through art history. This is the first show of his new pieces in which he includes portions of other artists’ work in his collages and constructions, often using the same image in varied works. Each time, it is a different size, a different snippet from the whole, and presents us with an entirely different effect.

Boghosian’s love of literature, art and poetry infuses the 30 pieces that fill the entire gallery. Since the 60’s, when he showed with Cornell, Rauschenberg and Rivers in New York, he has honed his love of found objects in creating provocative assemblages. Bonaparte’s March, the most painterly and colorful of the works, includes a pair of boots from an Andrew Wyeth painting, Trodden Weed, as well as details from Bosch, Velasquez and Dali, one of Boghosian’s perennial favorites.

Varujan Boghosian, Bonaparte’s March – Variation 1, The
Garden, 2018, collage, 24.5 x 17.75″. Photo courtesy of
BigTown Gallery.

The same pair of boots figures prominently in The Great Bouquet, where they become a ghostly grey presence transgressively striding onto an oversized bowl of roses that decorates the top of a vintage card table, complete with coffee stains. The shift of perspective gives the boots a three-dimensional quality and the artist likens them to dictators walking roughshod over democracy.

Boghosian’s piece, Mickey, is a masterful juxtaposition of shapes and subject matter created out of comic and high art. The lower part of Mickey’s body is dressed in his iconic red shorts and yellow boots. A mysterious blue eye, and part of a classically painted face forms his fanciful head. The mat is cut around the unique shape of the collage and forms its own amazing sculptural statement.

Y Knot is a calligraphy of delicate white wire knots, in rows, on a bold red background. There is one frayed leather knot, in the shape of a hanging “Y”, that holds the center. A cutout printed “Y” is also pasted onto the red substrate. The entire piece is a pun, humorous and, belying the lively, active intelligence of a nonagenarian artist who has honed his Dada and Surrealist origins to create windows into wondrous worlds.