Martin Barooshian

Martin Barooshian was an American painter and printmaker. He is known for his ability to weave a tapestry of art historical influences with modernist elements and a contemporary sensibility. His work frequently dances the line of Surrealism and Expressionism, often with a pop and op art edge, incorporating aspects of primitive, Romantic, and Renaissance art. He has worked in a wide variety of media from miniature etchings to oversized oils on canvas. These have included woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and engravings with aquatint and soft ground, monotypes, gouache and watercolor paintings, and oils. He is also known for his technical skill and innovation.

Barooshian is a restless innovator with work that has moved through many periods with varying styles and transitions. However, Barooshian defines himself as a Biomorphic Abstract Surrealist after his first personal artistic breakthrough and mature style. Cate McQuaid-art critic for The Boston Globe-dubbed Barooshian's biomorphic surrealist style as "Pablo Picasso meets Stan Lee," recognizing the blend of the modern with the contemporary. Further, she recognized that Barooshian held firm to his own artistic vision and was "not a follower of fashions" but instead "has always defined his own style…against the grain of the art scene."Barooshian has enjoyed a 70-year career as an artist and continues to actively create new works. Susan Faxon, associate director and Curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art, summed up her experience of reviewing Barooshian's oeuvre: "It was clear that [Barooshian] had devoted a lifetime to the making of art and that he was still fully engaged on a daily basis in the creative process. So too it was clear that here was an artist whose sweep was wide, whose influences and interests were many, whose output was prodigious, and whose exuberance, inventiveness, imagination, and artistic commitment was boundless." Patrick Murphy, Lia and William Poorvu Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston, called Barooshian "a consummate printmaker, whose intriguing and oddly overlooked body of work deserves to be celebrated alongside that of mid-century contemporaries like Hayter, Helen Phillips, Fred Becker, and Gabor Peterdi."A catalogue raisonne of Barooshian's prints from 1948 to 1970 has been completed.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023