Born in 1976 in Yerevan, Armenia, oil painter Tigran Tsitoghdzyan now lives in New York, US. Tigran discovered painting at the early age of five, and had his first solo exhibition of 103 paintings aged ten. The show gathered so much attention it travelled to many countries. In 1999, Tigran entered the Yerevan Academy of Art. He then pursued studies at the École Cantonale d’Art du Valais, Switzerland. After graduating in 2009, he moved to New York.

Although very realistic and seemingly inspired by photomanipulations, Tigran’s Mirror paintings are a slow, strenuous process. The artist contemplates how our society has become obsessed with self-portrait and how the life we relay on social media is distorted. We edit, manipulate visual and textual messages to show a specific image of ourselves, and discard the rest. The artist paints faces, unfiltered, piercing through closed hands – the natural gesture for hiding one’s face.

His newer series titled Self Isolation is evidently inspired by the profound disruptions of 2020. Still based on the principle of layering representations of a model reminiscent of double exposure effects, these paintings feature full bodies in intricate positions.

Tigran Tsitoghdzyan, #artlovers, 2018. Image courtesy of the artist and Opera Gallery.