The Sasse: Where love stories develop
between art and viewer

home | about | collection | giving | museum catalogs | exhibits | inspired

Vartan Ohanian
Forging Art & Legacy

Vartan Ohanian arrived in America from Armenia in 1980 with a formation few painters carry. He had graduated from the Terlemezian Art School in Yerevan, completed two years of postgraduate study at the Fine Arts and Theatre Institute of Yerevan, and extended his training further at the Estonian State Institute of Fine Arts. Three countries. Three institutions. A deep and disciplined understanding of what a composition can hold.

The paintings in this exhibition are rooted in Cubism but not governed by it. The palette runs warm, with moments of saturated color arriving inside carefully composed fields. The forms are geometric and interlocking, yet something organic lives inside each one. His training is visible in every canvas. So is something harder to teach. The sculptures in the room remind you where that training began.

Vartan is also a blacksmith. The monumental commissions of his earlier life included a memorial to the Armenian struggle for liberation in a public square in Yerevan, and a 75-foot chandelier forged for an architectural landmark in St. Petersburg, rising from the first floor to the top of the building in a single suspended gesture. He calls it his greatest accomplishment.

"If you do a big monumental work and then you do small things," he said, "it is never the same."

The paintings gathered here are what he makes now. Intimate in scale, precise in their ambition. And behind them, always, the larger longing.

"Right now, my energy goes into painting," he said, "but that is not enough. I need to start my real work, to let me expel my feelings. This is my love. It is my life."

We have chosen not to place descriptive labels beside the work in this exhibition. What Vartan has made carries its own conversation. Your part of it is yours to discover.

Apr 3rd - 25th 2026
Reception: Sun Apr 19th 2-4pm