VALPARISO, In. — Devarj Design Agency announced recently that Shanoor Varjabedian Devarj, owner, creative director, speaker, and an artist from Valparaiso and Munster, Indiana, as well as Chicago, was one of the global award-winning artists who are exhibiting for World-Wide Gallery for one year. He will be joining 50 artists worldwide as they travel to major art hotspots and show their works at first-class galleries.
The first stops on this journey are in Los Angeles, at Art Lab, Calif., and Casa Del Arte Palma, Spain. The next destination is Thomson Gallery Fine Art, Switzerland. They are followed by New York’s Art Week in April and Miami Art Week in Florida, where he will be exhibiting his paintings at Johnathan Schultz Gallery. The tour will continue until December 2023, with Swiss Art Expo and Lelie Gallery Amsterdam, Netherlands exhibits at various dates.
From creating new forms of life to contemporary portraiture, to mind-blowing murals and art installations, Shanoor’s work touches the soul. His unique style combines expressionism, pop art, street art and symbolism – creating new worlds that we can all imagine ourselves entering.
Alongside his fruitful career in branding and design for three decades, Shanoor continued to develop his personal artistic practice. Pairing his experience with graphic design, photography, digital imaging with his predilection for sculpting, painting, and illustrating, Shanoor developed a signature artistic language which he describes as Neo-Symbolic Expressionism, or Toto Coelo, “extreme conditions.” Shanoor’s Toto Coelo paintings have won numerous awards and have been exhibited internationally.
Displaced because of the Armenian Genocide, Shanoor’s parents relocated to Lebanon where he was born and spent his formative years until civil war broke out in 1975, forcing him to find a new adopted home in the United States. His journey as an Armenian-Lebanese-American informs a deep appreciation for freedom, justice and tolerance. These concepts reside at the heart of his artistic practice. Shanoor’s work is perhaps all the more relevant as we find ourselves at a crossroads in American democracy. He has experienced first-hand the devastation that occurs when society fails to value individual liberties.
The perspective he offers is both objective and empathetic, full of hope whilst recognizing the challenge ahead. Shanoor’s artwork stands as a testament to the fortitude and resilience of the human spirit. He was not born in Armenia, not born in the United States — yet, he is both an Armenian and an American. His viewpoint is charged with the immigrant experience — the pressure to assimilate, the universal desire to belong, an acute awareness that these ideas are not mutually exclusive, and in so many ways, they are never fully achievable. He understands there is power in that which is seen as peculiar. Through his art, Shanoor hopes to access and expand the viewer’s humanity. He uses bright colors and gestural brush strokes to depict vibrant new forms of life that team with magic. His style combines expressionism, pop art, street art and symbolism – at the same time, the art he makes is profoundly unique. By inventing original characters and creating an extraordinary visual landscape, one that is purposefully exotic, he challenges the viewer to step outside of their comfort zone, asking us to confront and overcome unseen prejudices. His artistic practice seeks to cultivate the radical acceptance he wishes for the world.
