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GERARDO ORAKIAN
(1901-1963)
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GERARDO ORAKIAN
Meeting
12x14.5 inches ink
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1901- was born in Constantinople.
1920 - moved to Rome, where studied at the Art Academy.
1947 , 1958 - Two personal exhibition in Rome, with a broad response among the artistic world.
1950, 1955 - twice took part in exhibitions in Venice and Rome, after which Italian criticism called him “a mysterious person, an artist with an unusual temperament”.
1963 - he died in Rome.
On confession of the artist himself, in spite of the fact that 40 years of his life were spent in
Europe to which be owed all the best in his life, including his education, be remained an Armenian and
considered himself an Armenian artist.
1966 - Posthumous personal exhibition in the National Gallery of Armenia.
The artist bequeathed all his art works to Armenia.
Most of his works are kept in the National Gallery of Armenia.
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Gerardo Orakian was born in 1901 in Constantinople. He completed his secondary education at the famous Getronakan Armenian School. He then moved to France, by 1920 he had settled in Rome. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and remained in Rome, where he lived and worked in extreme poverty and isolation until his death in 1963. By being an Italian-Armenian artist, his expressive paintings tell the story of someone who has been deprived of his birth land and suffered the fate of the migrant. His somber colored paintings are mixed with contrasting light; portray the deprived lives of the working people. Orakian’s desire to return to Armenia never happened although a great part of his works found its way into Armenia. His one-man exhibitions in 1947 and 1958 evoked a wide response in the artistic world. His works were saved in part by Armenian artists from other countries. Today, he is considered one of the most original Armenian artists of the 20th century.Orakian died in Rome. His dream never came true, and he never saw his motherland. But his legacy has settled in Armenia forever.
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Orakian openly and spontaneously as, perhaps, no one else, has embodied in hiscreation the emotional state of a wanderer, of person who has been deprived of his childhood.
Poverty accompanied Orakian for all his life. The leitmotif of his activity was the psycholgy of
the unfortunate people, who were on the verge between life and the death.
The wide-open eyes of his heroes came to express their own inner world, and slightly elongated hands as if clung to life with all their strength, By means of deformation the artist
aimed at attaining the highest possible expressiveness.
A touching trait is peculiar to Orakian’s art - dreaming to get rid of solitude, be arranges
people, and often also himself among them, as if they caress, embrace, support each other.
The warm pictorial atmosphere of his canvases also promotes such impression.
Shahen Khachartian Art Critic Yervan, Armenian
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