Clay sculpture made in the second year of immigrating to the US, symbolizing Armenia's broken national identity post soviet rule.
My work explores the interplay between form and formlessness.
Working primarily through abstraction, I am interested in the ways visible forms emerge from, express, and eventually dissolve back into a deeper underlying continuity. Rather than depicting specific subjects, the paintings serve as inquiries into perception itself and the fluid boundary between inner and outer experience.
The work often develops through a process of observation, intuition, and discovery. Layers are built, obscured, and revealed. Geometric structures intersect with organic movement. Forms appear, shift, and dissolve. Through this process, I explore the tension between structure and emergence, stillness and movement, and the interplay between the visible and the unseen.
Much of my recent work is informed by a growing curiosity about the nature of consciousness, perception, and the patterns of relationship that connect seemingly separate aspects of experience. Light, energy, and movement appear not as subjects in themselves, but as points of inquiry into the underlying forces that shape the world we perceive.
Rather than arriving at conclusions, the work seeks to create space for contemplation. It is an ongoing exploration of what remains when attention moves beyond the surface of things and toward the deeper continuity from which all forms arise.
Bio
................
................
Nune Vartanyan (b. 1981, Armenia) is an artist based in Maryland whose work explores perception, consciousness, and the relationship between visible form and the underlying forces from which it emerges.
Born in Armenia and shaped by the social and political transitions that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vartanyan’s early experiences of displacement and adaptation fostered a lasting sensitivity to impermanence, transformation, and the fluid nature of identity. After living in Russia, her family immigrated to the United States in 1996. She later studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she developed an approach that bridges visual experimentation with contemplative inquiry.
Working primarily through abstraction, Vartanyan’s practice explores the space where perception, form, and awareness intersect. Through layered surfaces and evolving processes, she investigates the blurring of boundaries between inner and outer experience, stillness and movement, and the visible and unseen. Her work is guided by a curiosity about the deeper continuity that underlies seemingly separate forms and the ways in which form itself may be understood as a temporary expression of something more fundamental.
Vartanyan’s work has been exhibited in Latela Curatorial x ARTSY’s Women in the Arts (2020) and Behind the Curtain (2021), and is held in private collections in the United States and abroad.