Karen Sargsyan🇳🇱

Karen Sargsyan is a sculptor who works not with bronze or stone, but with paper. He was born in the Armenian capital Yerevan and fled his homeland in 1998, seven years after Armenia became independent from the Soviet Union. He came to our country as a sports teacher, but picked up his love for drawing and painting in the asylum seekers’ centre. Karen Sargsyan lives and works in Amsterdam. Thanks to his paper lust, he was admitted to the Rijksakademie, which he attended from 2006-2007. During that period, he won the Thieme award, Art Amsterdam’s prize for young, promising visual artists.

Sargsyan works with paper and aluminium, transforming them into solid three-dimensional, layered sculptures with a Stanley knife and glue gun. The results are colourful characters, often referring to history, art or literature. They seem to be frozen in their expressive movements.

Karen Sargsyan’s paper sculptures are life-size and always wear a mask over the costumes. The artist often uses pastel shades; gradually, his use of colour also became more expressive. It leads to swirling and puppet-like figures that are at once vulnerable and strong. Many of his sculptures have their arms raised to heaven – they often refer to the primordial carousel of human existence.

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