An American Surrealist – Master Painter & Printmaker
Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1929, Martin Barooshian has lived and studied all over the world: New York, Paris, the Middle East, and India, to name a few.
Since the early 1950s, Barooshian has been fascinated by fantastic art and surrealism. He cites the work of Miró, Matta, Dali, and in particular Arshile Gorky, as contributing to the development of his mature style. Barooshian shares with them an artistic commitment to exploring the subconscious. Imagination, fantasy, and freedom of thought are paramount. And at a time when his aesthetic philosophy was emerging and taking shape, his technical skills as a graphic artist received new impetus.
In Paris, in 1956, he studied intaglio printmaking with Stanley W. Hayter at Atelier 17. This experience was profoundly important for Barooshian and for many other artists, including Picasso, who came to know and work with this important innovator and teacher.
Mystery, humor, romance, eroticism, lyricism, line, color and the subconscious mind are all part of the artistic concerns of Martin Barooshian. He is a technician and a thinker. He acknowledges the work of others and yet has innumerable ideas of his own to contend with and make visible. His art is not voguish or predictable. His art invites us and encourages a contemplative spirit as we peer more closely and carefully. In the graphic arts as well as in oils, Martin Barooshian delights in the known and the unknown, and he explores both worlds with inspired technical finesse.
Barooshian’s prints — lithographs, etching and woodcuts are notable for their artistic qualities as well as the care and expertise he brings to them as a master technician printmaker. Barooshian’s work is in some of the most prestigious museums in the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Library of Congress, Currier Gallery of Art, and the International Gallery of Art, New Delhi, India, as well as in numerous private collections.
Barooshian, with degrees from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts and Tufts University, a graduate degree from Boston University and further training in Europe (Paris mainly), has won numerous fellowships and awards. He has served as the President of the Society of American Graphic Artists, Vice President of the U .S., Committee to the International Association of Art (UNESCO), guest curator at Pratt Graphics Center in New York, and is a frequent juror for national and international art competitions.