Birth of the Universe, Anush Babayan, H: 27.5”

Description

Anush Babayan’s Birth of the Universe presents a visual meditation on the origins of existence, an artistic rendering of the first cosmic breath. At its core, a swirling, embryonic form expands outward, disrupting and animating the surrounding field with kinetic lines and fractured color. The palette—with its earthy ochres, astral blues, and sudden golden flashes—evokes both the alchemical mystery of matter and the sacred geometry of beginnings. Babayan’s strokes layer textures of motion and reverberation, suggesting that the universe is not a static construct, but an unfolding miracle. The painting holds in tension both chaos and order—the trembling boundary where formlessness births into form.

The renowned American art critic Peter Frank once wrote the following analysis of Anush’s distinctly celestial subject matter and style:

“What world, or universe, does Anush Babayan inhabit? It is one strange and alienating and at the same time eerily familiar. These unearthly apparitions, redolent of cosmic calamities and the nebulas they leave behind, seem like the kinds of phenomena visible only through the most powerful and far-flung telescopes. But lurking in their nuclei, bobbing at the event horizons of these ever-metamorphosing black holes, are hints of life, even of humanity, as if some dreamt-of soul has come to inhabit, perhaps even to animate, the galaxies that dwarf us. We are physically much tinier than the things we find throughout the heavens; but what size is our spirit? Can the passion of one human heart be encompassed by a vast, glowing clot of gas? Can the faith of an orbiting planet match the faith of a pet or a spouse here on earth? Can we see the far end of another man or woman any easier than we can the far end of the firmament? Anush Babayan’s paintings may lose us in the stars, but their biggest revelation is that the stars are within us, that every human is a cosmic mystery. For all the glorious luminescence of her elusive renditions, Babayan’s preoccupation is with her own species and its own radiance.”