Exhibition: Léon Tutundjian

Léon Arthur Tutundjian was an Armenian artist best known as a founding member of the Art Concret movement. Born in Amasia, in the Ottoman Empire, Tutundjian’s early life was characterized by instability due to the systematic destruction of the Armenian people, forcing him to move to Turkey, Greece, Italy, and eventually France, where he settled in 1924.

After his arrival in Paris, Tutundjian found work as a ceramicist, and began creating Cubist inspired works on paper, building on the skills he previously learned at the Istanbul School of Fine Arts. After befriending artists Ervand Kotchar and David Kakabadzé, who ushered him into the Parisian art scene and introduced new techniques of mark-making that had a lasting impact on his oeuvre, Tutundjian then turned to abstract Tachisme-style gouaches that were inspired by the writings of the Bauhaus movement.

Alongside Theo van Doesburg, Otto Gustav Carlsund, Jean Hélion, and Marc Wantz, Tutundjian was a founding member of the Art Concrete movement in 1930. In 1931, Tutundjian helped found the Abstraction-Création group, but his association with the movement was short lived, as he abandoned abstraction in favor of Surrealism the following year. Tutundjian continued to work within the Surrealist style throughout the 1940s and 50s and regularly exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants. After 1959, however, Tutundjian returned to abstraction, creating many drawings and paintings, as well as reliefs, that focused on the principles of sign and gesture. Tutundjian remained in Paris until his death in 1968.

Credit: Fondation Léon Tutundjian
https://tutundjian.org/en/home/