ISTANBUL.- Galeri 77 is hosting Gayane Avetissian’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, titled “Tabula Rasa”, between December 25 – February 14. In Tabula Rasa, Armenian artist Avetissian presents a focused body of recent works, four canvases and twenty- four works on paper foregrounding drawing as an autonomous and investigative medium. Rooted in traditional techniques yet shaped by contemporary conceptual inquiry, the exhibition examines the idea of the “blank slate” as a space already marked by memory, education, and lived experience.
Born in 1995 in Yerevan, Armenia, Gayane Avetissian is a contemporary artist whose practice reconsiders painting and drawing within a broader conceptual framework. She studied at the Painting Department of Panos Terlemezyan State College of Fine Arts (2012–2017) and later at the Graphics Department of the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia (2017–2020). In 2021, she continued her education at the Institute of Contemporary Art after Joseph Backstein in Moscow, studying with a full scholarship, and was selected as a resident at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Over the past decade, Avetissian has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Armenia, Lebanon, and Russia, and has worked as an artistic director for several theatre productions in Armenia.
Tabula Rasa brings together four works on canvas and twenty-four works on paper, with a clear emphasis on paper as the primary site of artistic inquiry. The predominance of works on paper signals a deliberate turn toward immediacy, reduction, and a primitive visual language, where gesture, repetition, and instinct take precedence over refinement. These works are not conceived as preparatory studies; rather, they function as complete and autonomous expressions, recording processes of thought, memory, and perception in their most direct form.
Conceptually, the exhibition engages with the philosophical notion of tabula rasa, questioning the assumption that identity, learning, or artistic expression can ever begin from neutrality. Avetissian approaches the surface not as an empty ground, but as one already shaped by inherited memory, emotional experience, and cultural imprint. Through raw lines, fragmented figures, and symbolic imagery, the works suggest that every act of inscription is also an act of negotiation with what already exists.
Education, upbringing, and lifelong learning operate as underlying frameworks throughout the exhibition. The serial and repetitive structure of the paper works echoes processes of learning and unlearning, inscription and erasure, reflecting how identity is continuously formed and re-formed over time. Avetissian’s fluid movement between abstraction, primitivism, neo- expressionism, and realism mirrors the layered and often contradictory nature of human perception.
Recurring motifs rooted in childhood memory, personal fear, and collective cultural references appear in distilled form across the works. Rather than functioning as fixed symbols, these figures act as psychological markers, bridging the individual and the collective. The canvases, fewer in number, serve as spatial anchors within the exhibition, while the paper works sustain its conceptual intensity and rhythm.
Ultimately, Tabula Rasa presents transformation as an open-ended and ongoing process. By privileging exposure over resolution, the exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the idea of beginnings themselves revealing the “blank slate” as a surface already marked by experience, vulnerability, and possibility.
