Martin Barooshian

Martin Barooshian (1929-2022) was an American painter and printmaker. He is known for his expertise to weave a tapestry of art historical influences once modernist elements and a contemporary sensibility. His feat frequently dances the heritage of Surrealism and Expressionism, often in the same way as a pop and op art edge, incorporating aspects of primitive, Romantic, and Renaissance art. He has worked in a wide variety of media from miniature etchings to oversized oils upon canvas. These have included woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and engravings subsequently aquatint and soft ground, monotypes, gouache and watercolor paintings, and oils. He is also known for his technical capacity and innovation.

Barooshian is a distressed innovator with play a role that has moved through many periods later than varying styles and transitions. However, Barooshian defines himself as a Biomorphic Abstract Surrealist after his first personal artistic breakthrough and mature style. Cate McQuaid—art critic for The Boston Globe—dubbed Barooshian's biomorphic surrealist style as “Pablo Picasso meets Stan Lee,” recognizing the fusion of the futuristic with the contemporary. Further, she endorsed that Barooshian held unqualified to his own artistic vision and was “not a devotee of fashions” but instead “has always defined his own style…against the grain of the art scene.”

Barooshian has enjoyed a 70-year career as an performer and continues to actively Make new works. Susan Faxon, associate director and Curator of the Addison Gallery of American Art, summed up her experience of reviewing Barooshian's oeuvre: “It was clear that [Barooshian] had devoted a lifetime to the making of art and that he was yet fully engaged upon a daily basis in the creative process. So too it was distinct that here was an artist whose sweep was wide, whose influences and interests were many, whose output was prodigious, and whose exuberance, inventiveness, imagination, and artistic duty was boundless.“

A catalogue raisonne of Barooshian's prints from 1948 to 1970 has been completed.