Paruyr Davtyan: Davtyan Paruyr

July 25, 2025 – October 12, 2025 The exhibition, Paruyr Davtyan: Davtyan Paruyr is structured around several key axes, aiming not only to introduce an Armenian artist who has remained unknown within the Armenian art scene but also to present, through his first solo exhibition in Armenia, the phenomenon of Moscow Conceptualism — itself virtually unknown in the local context — as embodied by one of its prominent and active representatives.

Paruyr Davtyan entered the Moscow art scene in the post-Soviet era, at a time when Moscow Conceptualism was branching into a new discursive phase, connected to the analytical layer of the original tradition but operating within a completely different ideological and cultural framework. At the crossroads of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the new generation of conceptualists — formed in the ferment of postmodern and even metamodern tendencies — began to charge the visual language with new meaning, turning classical conceptualism into meta-conceptualism.

The exhibition, Paruyr Davtyan: Davtyan Paruyr consists entirely of reference-rich works, shaped in the turbulent flows of both local Moscow and global art histories — their known and unknown pages.

Through deconstructing artworks from the past, Davtyan reassembles their fragments into new compositions. In fact, the layering and rearranging of established codes is one of the artist’s core methods.

Paruyr Davtyan (born in 1976 in Leninakan, now Gyumri, Armenia) is a Moscow-based Armenian artist working across painting, sculpture, performance, and conceptual installation. He graduated from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Moscow in 2010 and is closely associated with the analytical branch of Moscow Conceptualism. Davtyan is a member of several artist groups, including Edelweiss, Tsar Gory, and Cupid Artel, known for their collaborative installations, performances, and critical engagement with Soviet cultural legacies. His solo exhibitions include Spores at ILONA-K Artspace (2021), Revelation of the Wonderful Pond at the Multimedia Art Museum (2021), and Garden of Interior Stones at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture (2019), all in Moscow. He has also exhibited at institutions such as Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, MMOMA, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, and participated in Cosmoscow and other major art fairs. His work draws on Soviet iconography, Western art history, and philosophical paradoxes, often merging new mythologies, texts, and aesthetical discourses, creating environments he calls “gardens.”