Exhibited at Frieze Masters 2022, join us at Sonia’s Tribeca studio for further insights into her multimedia and curatorial practice.
Sonia Balassanian's practice explores themes of memory, identity, and displacement. Her work encompasses a wide range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, installation, and video.
Balassanian's artistic vocabulary is characterized by her abstract lyricism style, her use of shades of blues inspired by the Iranian sky, scribbles on canvas linking to her poetry writings, and layered collage. Her works often incorporate fragments of personal and collective memories interwoven with historical and cultural references.
One of Balassanian's most prominent themes is the Iranian revolution, a subject that she addresses through her unique artistic lens to shed light on its ongoing impact on the Iranian people, their diaspora as well as her own story – this is seen more specifically and powerfully in her series Hostages.
She has exhibited her work extensively and internationally and is included in numerous collections.
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Sonia Balassanian was born in 1942 in Iran to parents of Armenian origin. She lives and work in New York, USA, and Armenia. Balassanian graduated with a BFA from the joint program of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, in 1970, followed by a year at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. She graduated with an MFA from the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, in 1978. Sonia Balassanian’s painting emerged as a form of Lyrical Abstraction before it took a dramatic turn after the political turmoil that led to the Iranian Revolution of 1978-9. Her art became more explicitly political, and the artist in turn, also simultaneously operated as a social activist for women’s rights. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at MoMA, New York; SculptureCenter, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; the Armenian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale and the Asia Society Museum, New York and more recently was part of the Spotlight section of Frieze Masters London. Balssanian's work is part of numerous private and institutional collections such as Sharjah Art Foundation, Tehram Museum of Contemporary Art and Prof. Edward M. Bergman Collection.
