Artist Anoush Bargamian Debuts Her First Solo Show at AIR Gallery in October!

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Encaustic paintings of Anoush Bargamian from her series Pajama Party (encaustic)

AIR Studio + Gallery is excited to announce the first solo show of Chicago artist Anoush Bargamian, "Stories We Carry: Memories, Color, Childhood, & Belonging." Bargamian's exhibition brings together encaustic paintings from Pajama Party and Scattered series, along with additional vibrant and minimalist works exploring memory, identity, belonging, and displacement. The show opening event is Saturday, October 3, 2026, from 5:00-8:00PM at AIR Gallery, 348 Tudor Court, Glencoe, and the show runs October 2 - 31. She will present an artist talk on Saturday, October 17, from 3:00-4:30PM at AIR. Anoush Bargamian is a member of AIR Studio.

The exhibition moves between the lightness and freedom of childhood memories and the deeper, inherited histories that shape identity across generations. Together, the works explore how personal and collective experiences become embedded in our sense of self, and how fragments of memory, family, and place remain with us over time.

Anoush Bargamian shared, “Memory inspires my work—from childhood and family to the places and stories we carry with us. I love working with color, texture, and gesture to create paintings that feel layered, tactile, and alive. The process is both meditative and playful, and each painting becomes a discovery—something unexpected that invites you to look a little longer.”

Some of the works represent a departure from Bargamian’s earlier paintings, embracing a lighter and more playful sensibility inspired by childhood memories. In Pajama Party, repeated marks, circles, dots, and gestures emerge intuitively, recalling the freedom and absorption of childhood play. The process of making becomes rhythmic and meditative—a space to slow down, become immersed, and experience a sense of freedom. The series evokes the warmth and nostalgia of sleepovers, friendship, imagination, and the fleeting moments of joy that remain with us long after childhood has passed. Alongside Pajama Party are vibrant and minimalist encaustic works that extend Bargamian’s exploration of color, texture, atmosphere, and abstraction. Some embrace saturated color and energetic marks, while others are more restrained, allowing subtle shifts in tone, surface, and light to come forward.

The Scattered series draws upon a personal family history profoundly affected by the 1915 Armenian Genocide under the Ottoman Empire and the enduring experience of the Armenian diaspora. Within these works, pomegranate seeds appear suspended and scattered across the surfaces in vivid reds, from luminous crimson to deep blood tones. The scattered seeds evoke the dispersal of a people while carrying the enduring symbolism of the pomegranate within Armenian culture.

A deeply rooted Armenian symbol, the pomegranate represents fertility, abundance, life, continuity, and resilience. Its many seeds can be understood as a metaphor for a people dispersed across the world while remaining connected through shared history, culture, and identity. In this context, the pomegranate becomes both a symbol of loss and a testament to survival and renewal. The more recent displacement of Armenians from the Republic of Artsakh further echoes this history of loss, displacement, and dispersal.

Across the exhibition, Bargamian’s encaustic process of building layer upon layer of beeswax, oil, color, and mark—revealing and concealing what lies beneath—becomes both a meditative practice and a metaphor for memory: what we inherit, what we remember, and what we carry forward. Whether exuberant or restrained, each work gathers fragments of childhood, family history, place, color, and identity into layered paintings that reflect the stories we carry with us.