Aziz art March 2018

Marcos Grigorian
December 5, 1925 – August 27,
2007 was a notable Iranian-
Armenian artist
and a pioneer of Iranian modern
art.
Biography
Grigorian was born in Kropotkin,
Russia, to an Armenian family
from Kars who had fled that city
to escape massacres when it was
captured by Turkey in 1920.
In 1930 the family moved from
Kropotkin to Iran, living first in
Tabriz, and then in Tehran. After
finishing pre-university
education in Iran, in 1950 he
studied at the Accademia di Belle
Arti in Rome. Graduating from
there in 1954, he returned to Iran,
opened the Galerie Esthétique, an
important commercial gallery in
Tehran. In 1958, under the
auspices of the Ministry of Culture,
he organized the first Tehran
Biennial. Grigorian was also an
influential teacher at the Fine Arts
Academy, where he disseminated
his enthusiasm for local popular
culture, including coffee-house
paintings, a type of folk art named
after the locations in which they
were often displayed.
He lived in the 1960s in the United
States first moving in 1962 to New
York City, and then moved to
Minneapolis to work at Minnetonka
Center for the Arts. In Minneapolis
he started Universal Galleries which
became an influential center for
Iranian art in Minneapolis, and it
existed at the same time along with
a quickly growing Modern Iranian
art collection that could be found at
artist Abby Weed Grey's home.Grey
went on to later become an art
dealer and gallerist and specialized
in Modern Iranian art with her large
collection and influencing many
artists.
In 1975 Grigorian helped organize
the group of free painters and
sculptors in Tehran and was one of
its founder members. Artists
Gholamhossein Nami, Massoud
Arabshahi, Morteza Momayez, Mir
Abdolrez Daryabeigi, and Faramarz
Pilaram were amongst the other
members of the group. As a
modernist pop artist Marcos
Grigorian turned to ordinary
objects and popular ethnic forms
and approaches.