by Peter Frank

THE BUNKER GROUP

FIRST AND SECOND GENERATIONS

by Peter Frank

“HOMELESS ART” Show and performance 2001, Glendale Parking Lot. The first row – composer Tigran Takhemesian performs his abstract composition, second row – Sev creates art with his gas burner, third row – Kiki creates large scale Bobo image. In 1989 businessman and aesthete Sergei Djavadian made a discovery: he came across a group of artists working in Yerevan in styles seldom seen anywhere in the USSR, and certainly not in Armenia. The artists were essentially collapsing the recent history of Euro-American abstraction – including Abstract Expressionism, Art Informel, Color Field painting, Minimalism, and Support-Surface, among other movements – into a bouquet of formal choices whose application signaled non-conformity and non-compliance with the regime. By this time, however, perestroika had released Soviet artists from their sequestration, allowing radical art by Russian contemporaries to come to the surface. Thus, Djavadian found his artistic soulmates, who, under his beneficence, became the painters of the Bunker Group.

The six artists Djavadian began to collect were all, in his estimation, devoting their lives to the utterances of their souls. They were not theorists but practitioners, not ideologues but individuals protective of their hard-won artistic prerogatives – non-objective styles they had been developing since the 1970s. Djavadian saw each artist as a different universe, scraping the metaphysics of human existence with his particular, even peculiar, concatenations. A jazz enthusiast, Djavadian recognized the integrity of improvised expression manifest – quite differently, but to the same intensity – in the work of each.

This “mighty Six” constituted the first generation of Bunker artists; as the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed them to travel and emigrate, they settled in Moscow, Paris, and Los Angeles, making many new associations, including with younger artists who continue the Bunker ethos.

Armen Hadjan in front of his art, Young Armenian Artists exhibition, Yerevan, 1989

Modern Art exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, 1988. First row on the far right, Sev among other participating artists Second row - Offenbach, Rotch, Kiki, Achot Achot, and other artists Third row - Martin among other participating artists

After the exhibition in the House of Artists, (Dom Hudozhnikov) 1990, Yerevan: Sev, Rotch, Kiki, Offenbach with his wife Natasha and other artists

Armenian Artists Union, 1989. Achot Achot's performance.

Monochromatic Art Exhibition, Yerevan, 1990. From left to right - Kiki, Stepan Panosian, Rotch.

Unofficial Art Show of Young nonconformist artists, 1985. In the background is the Installation of Edward Enfiajan. From left to right - first & second row Sev, Edward Enfiajan, Kiki, Rotch

In Rotch's studio, 1984: From left to right - Kiki and Rotch