VENICE, Italy — The Republic of Armenia presents “The Studio,” a solo project by artist Zadik Zadikian, for the Pavilion of the Republic of Armenia at the 61st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The project is co-curated by legendary art dealer Tony Shafrazi, whose decades-long relationship and close collaboration with Zadikian shape the conceptual framework of the Pavilion, alongside Boston-based curator and cultural strategist Tina Chakarian, who has played a central role in advancing Armenia’s presence at La Biennale di Venezia since 2015 as Commissioner and Development Director of the Armenian Pavilion.
On view from May 9 through November 22, the Pavilion reimagines the exhibition space as a living studio — an active site of production, transformation, and renewal that unfolds over the full duration of the festival.
This presentation marks the continuation of Shafrazi and Zadikian’s decades-long collaboration, which began in the late 1970s with Zadikian’s first solo exhibition in Tehran at Shafrazi’s then-new eponymous gallery, just weeks before the fall of Iran’s ruling shah and on the cusp of the profound political and social transformations that would follow. At that time, a young Zadikian observed laborers carefully stacking clay bricks to dry in the open air at a facility nearly 200 miles from Tehran. “I was completely taken by the way they were making sculptures without knowing what they were doing,” he recalls. Ever since, the brick has become a central material and conceptual anchor in his work, continuing to inform Zadikian’s sustained engagement with repetition, labor, and the transformation of basic forms into complex structures.
In Venice, Zadikian will operate a fully functioning studio, in which objects — principally plaster bricks of varying scales and pigments — are formed, cast, and assembled by the artist and his studio assistants over the course of the exhibition. Each composite form is built by stacking multiple individual bricks of different sizes that remain separate and movable, allowing the arrangement to change and develop over time. This emphasis on repetition and physical presence places the project in dialogue with early modernist and post-Minimalist sculpture, recalling the work of Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, and reflecting a shared inquiry by both Zadikian and Shafrazi into form and the experience of space.
Aptly titled “The Studio,” the installation invites visitors to witness and engage directly with Zadikian’s process and materials, allowing the work to unfold in real time. By making production visible, the project challenges the often ritualized and private conventions of the artist’s studio, reframing it instead as a site of openness, exchange, and collective labor. In this way, The Studio recalls the legacy of Pop Art’s factories and ateliers — most notably Andy Warhol’s Factory — while emphasizing sustained, hands-on production over spectacle. As critic Carlo McCormack observes, “The Studio, for Zadikian, is workroom, factory, and laboratory at once — a locus of constant production, invention, and reinvention, a place of infinite possibility where art is not simply what is made; it is the study of its creation, and what we make of it.”
Furthermore, Chakarian’s longstanding engagement with Armenia’s cultural infrastructure — both within the Republic and across its global diaspora — inflects the Pavilion with a broader commitment to visibility, continuity and international dialogue. Since 2015, as Commissioner and Development Director of the Armenian Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia, she has played a central role in shaping Armenia’s sustained presence on this global stage, overseeing curatorial development, institutional partnerships, and strategic fundraising efforts. Her work bridges generations of artists working in Yerevan and abroad, positioning Armenian contemporary art within an expansive transnational discourse while honoring its distinct historical and cultural narratives.
