Krikor Agopian was born in 1942 in Beirut, Lebanon. His Armenian background is deeply anchored in some of his most renown works and recognized by the community and the country. Influenced by the country’s history and one of the worse genocides known from 1915, his work is a deep reflection of an unrooted nation still in search of identity. He lived and grew up in Palestine, Jaffa, where his father worked before going back to Lebanon in 1948. From there, he left for Montreal in 1963 where he studied arts at Concordia University and by Washington D.C. He finally married his beautiful wife Francine Fontaine, a French Canadian in 1972 before going back to live in Lebanon with his life partner while regularly traveling back to Quebec.
In Lebanon, he was an arts teacher at the Lebanese Academy of Arts from 1977 to 1981, then in Bayreuth and Kaslik at the University Saint-Esprit. Despite the troubled period in Lebanon, at war since the mid-70s, he kept working on his passion while illustrating his attachment for his home country and the chaos it went through.
In 1989, while traveling back to Quebec, the war zone grows to a point where he cannot return to his home country. He makes Quebec his new home in 1990 while exploring handmade paper techniques. He wins the Excellence Prize of Laval for his work in 1991 before heading back to Lebanon in 1992 with his family. By 1996, he decides to move permanently with his family in Québec where he still resides.
His Works
Agopian is recognized for his unique work in surrealism that he takes quite literarily, just like his work on “Vénus” where women shine brightly in a world where women’s rights have still a long way to go. “We can take away a woman’s fundamental rights, but we can’t take away what is deeply etched in its soul.”
Early 2000 marks the beginning of his work on “Fruit des Dieux” where the pomegranate steals the light and connecting back to his roots as an Armenian and the country’s symbol. He puts the fruit in distorted spaces where appearances get mixed up in an optical illusion.
His work and talent uses a wide range of techniques: figurative or not, explicit or allusive, optical illusions, collage, drawings… And yet, despite the wide variety of approaches, he always aims for the same “The Mirage of Appearances”. His 2013 series about large pine trees is an excellent example of such complexity. Hyper realistic pine trees with a deeply rooted symbolism, Lebanon’s icon. The trees are the witnesses of a long bloody history of massacres where once so many of them stood and now numbering but a few. Roots exposed and ripped trunks represent well the fragility and the wounds of Lebanon to which he is deeply attached.
All and all, he was hosted in more than 250 collective exhibitions in North America Canada, The United States, Europe and the Middle East. Agopian’s art works can be found in many private, and public collections, Museums,Art societies in Canada, United State, Europe and Middle East .
