Biography
I was born in a house that was always filled with the spirit of a screw that fluttered between life and death. I fell asleep for the first time on May 9, 1942, early in the morning, in a round room with the moon on my lap. The red sun was swimming in the window... Then they took me to a house where lions lived. We rode over a bridge made of glass branches of a cherry tree, and from the house the magician's song could be heard. His voice turned into a violin.
. . . The events that affected me in my early childhood still remain a mystery scattered throughout the city. A parade to the city's “Mustaid” park, winged shoes... My mother took me to “Mustaid” to enjoy the earthly wonders - “laughing” and “crying” mirrors. My mother left me there alone, but secretly watched me from afar... A carousel, a lion with burning lamps in its eyes, a ship on the Kura River. I am three years old, and we are sailing...
Gayane Khachaturyan belongs to the generation of our artists of the 1960s, who professed a creative independent way of thinking and foresaw a new rise. Independence prompted Gayane to follow her inner vision and create visionary images.
The artist's birthplace, Tiflis, with its ancient courtyards reminiscent of theater stages, her mother from Agulis, endowed with a rare gift of storytelling, her memories of her mother, known as a kind-hearted princess in her birthplace, and the beauties of the world of Goghtan, have rooted Gayane's imagination and made her art a nourishing soil...
“One day, on a white morning, I met Sergey Parajanov. The sky, in harmony with our mutual understanding, was blooming like a bright flower. He gave me the fragile tenderness of the comprehensive world...”
— Gayane Khachaturyan
Her innate talent is evident in the colorful still lifes she painted at the age of 13-14. The natural forms of these works are later transformed, becoming restrained, cryptic (of course, stemming from the description) and, woven into the already vibrant, wide color scales, they turn the canvas into a scenic, fresco, and also fairy-tale scene. The somewhat mysterious and childlike atmosphere of all the paintings signed by Gayane in Armenian and marked in Russian on the back of the canvases, bearing poetic titles, is the attractive basis for the vivid identity and beauty of her art. Thanks to that basis, the mood dictated by the paintings, sometimes breathing with joyful festive brightness, sometimes with sad, pensive silence, involuntarily responds, becomes familiar to the viewer... Numerous works born from the dreamy soul of the artist, who lived alone after the death of her mother, were quickly bought, acquired, and also sent to exhibitions, which increased the assessment of her personality. By the way, I should note that, she always helped the poor, despite getting not that high amount of money. At the exhibition organized at the National Gallery of Armenia, Gayane's works that recently participated in the Venice Biennale are summarized in a separate hall. Among the fifty best works brought together, “Requiem” is a pivotal one, a painting that is also perceived as a heavy tragedy of Gayane’s untimely departure from life...
— Shahen Khachatryan