Talar Aghbashian
Talar Aghbashian (b. 1981, Beirut) lives and works in London, UK.
Aghbashian’s gestural paintings are triggered by her discoveries and recordings of different landscapes. She also makes use of collected images, and different processes such as drawing or working with clay. They result in imagined paintings, where the landscapes are host to the different ideas projected onto them, floating in historical atemporality. Like an archaeologist, she delves to deal with the overlapping and intersection of different narratives in a bid to understand the ambiguities of our time.
Aghbashian graduated with a BA degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University (1999-2003), and completed her MA degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London. She was a recipient of AGBU grant NY, and Benlian Trust grant, London, UK (2007-2008). She also studied curating at Birkbeck University of London (2009-2010). She has been exhibiting since 1998 in the UK, Germany, Lebanon, and the UAE, and has an extensive career in teaching colour, drawing, illustration and history of art at MUT University (2003-2007) and other schools in Lebanon, and worked as a curator at the Natural History Museum and the V&A, London (2009-2010).
She has been part of group exhibitions at: Barge House (2008), Cordy House (2008), Coningsby Gallery (2009), Brunei Gallery, SOAS (2010), Bearspace Gallery (2012), ING Discerning Eye Exhibition at the Mall Galleries (2012), Turps Gallery (2016), and the Sluice Biennial (2017). Her last two solo exhibitions were Blind Finds at the Running Horse, Beirut (2013), and Site/Sight at Carbon 12, Dubai (2015).
In 2016, Aghbashian was a recipient of the John Moores prize (UK).