Vagrich Bakhchanyan


Vagrich Hakobi Bakhchanyan was a Soviet and American painter, Soviet nonconformist and Ukrainian underground artist and writer-conceptualist of Armenian origin and in the Russian language.

Biography

He was born to an ethnic Armenian family in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he grew up, studied and began painting. In the mid-1960s he moved to Moscow, where he worked at Literaturnaya Gazeta. In 1974 Bakhchanyan emigrated to United States, and lived in New York City, where he was active in the literary and art scene. There he collaborated with Russian and Soviet émigré writers Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Genis, and Naum Sagalovsky, among others. He died on November 12, 2009 in New York City. According to Vagrich's last will, his ashes were scattered high in the Geghama mountains, over a stone covered with ancient petroglyphs.
According to Alexander Genis, Bakhchanyan "possessed a keen sensitivity to the absurdities of the Soviet regime. By developing and experimenting with inventive artistic strategies, Bakhchanyan broadened the range of expressive possibilities for other nonconformist artists. Many of his puns became an intrinsic part of Soviet dissident culture."

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