Art Toronto 2024 : Group Presentation

Sirak Melkonian (1930 - 2024) was a self-taught Iranian-Armenian artist and a painter of abstract landscapes who resided in Toronto, Canada. At the age of fifteen, he participated in the group painting exhibition of the Armenian Cultural Association called "Mshakuyt" and then, in 1950, he attended the annual exhibition of the Iran-USSR Society, Tehran.

Melkonian worked closely with Marco Grigorian and got to know the art nouveau movement through the magazines and newspapers that Marco sent from Italy. In his early figurative paintings, Melkonian, used social issues, people's life, and folk traditions in an expressionistic format as the basis of his works. In the course of his activity, the tendency towards abstraction became more colorful in his works, and the line became the main element. Over a long period, the landscape became the main subject of his work. Creating regular networks of lines in the background with gray, black, brown, green, and shell colors creates an abstract space, evoking Melkonian's perception of nature.

Yousha Bashir (b. 1989) is an Iranian post-digital artist currently active in his hometown of Tehran. He studied Visual Arts at Farhangian University (2011). Bashir works across media to create paintings, sculptures, and installation pieces.

Yousha Bashir is a dynamic artist whose work has undergone significant changes in style and output. His landscape series (Inner Landscapes, Outer Landscapes, Ultimate Landscapes, The Infinite Continuum) and his self-portraits are relational studies of form with the frame (the viewers' perception) and the space surrounding the frame. He thus challenges the painting’s solid framework by exploring the relationship between the digital realm and the physicality of painting. His vibrant and luminous imagery question the definition of the creative space and the creative loci in the digital age and computer graphics. The self and how it is separated from the real world is one of the central explorations throughout his works. With the loss of image clarity in the process of a digital translation, he arrives at frames that open to a new two-dimensional world defined by restrictions and opportunities each possesses.

Bashir has held six solo exhibitions, including his latest, "The Infinite Continuum" (Parallel Circuit, October-November 2021), and participated in more than 30 exhibitions, including at the Frieze Los Angeles (2022) as well as Art Dubai (2020 and 2021) with Dastan's Basement.