NEW YORK — Adam Torcomian is a conceptual artist working across painting, performance, photography and self-publication, whose practice examines diaspora, erasure, and the inherited weight of history. In May 2026, paintings from “Julfa,” his four-year series in Armenian pigment, oils, wax, and charcoal, were shown in AGBU’s “Roots & Vines” art exhibition at Ethan Cohen Gallery in Chelsea, New York.
Julfa takes its name from the medieval Armenian city in Nakhchivan, where thousands of intricately carved khachkars were erected in the cemetery, and then were systematically destroyed by the Azerbaijani government in the 20th century.
Torcomian, 28, treats that loss as a pattern rather than an isolated event, placing it beside the devastation of heritage sites in wartime and the disappearance of Indigenous landscapes under colonization; acts that share a purpose in erasing evidence of a people’s existence. Each canvas begins with archival photographs, folk imagery and sheet music gathered from Armenian books, buried under paint as the studio moves around them. The imagery is never fully legible; it works as a symbolic record, and its partial visibility becomes the paintings’ argument for resilience.
The materials carry their own provenance: pigment sourced from Armenian provinces, oil, wax, and charcoal, worked over mid-20th-century photography books and 19th-century texts on paper. The paintings are discovered as other works develop nearby, these surfaces collect the incidental marks of a fast studio process and what remains is brought forward as a standalone piece.
Torcomian, a third-generation Armenian-American, trained in painting under Armen Arutunian, a graduate of the Yerevan Academy of Fine Arts, and holds a B.S. from Drexel University. His work has appeared at the Embassy of Armenia in Washington, D.C. (2024); with AGBU at Ethan Cohen Gallery (2025, 2026) and Sedef Gali Gallery (2025); and in a solo exhibition at Masterpieces Fine Art (2024). He contributes to Armenian relief and education organizations and has self-published three books, most recently Torcomian: Armenian Roots (2025). He lives and works in New York.
His recent installations include a ten-part painting commission at Apricot Stone (Armenian restaurant) in Philadelphia as well as a two-part painting installation at Cafe Pom, Paoli, Penn.
