This Saturday, September 9, from 5pm - 9pm, Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is holding a reception for the Catalogue Release of Rudik Ovsepyan’s ongoing survey show, with a Piano performance by the remarkable young pianist Jonas (Ovsepyan’s grandson). The performance is set to begin at 6pm. Pieces to be performed include Burgmüller’s “Ballade”, Clementi’s “Sonatina No1 in C Major”and Mozart’s “Sonata No 16 in C Major”. This multi-generational event picks-up the various threads of Ovsepyan’s life that continuously wind around family, music, art, memory, and history. Ovsepyan’s first historical survey exhibition, Magaxat | Survey (1976 - Present), presents mixed-media painting, sculpture, and prints that signal significant turning-points in the evolution of his work over the course of nearly 50 years. The exhibition remains on view through September 23, 2023. …. Following the 1988 Spitak earthquake in Armenia, Ovsepyan’s artistic production became rampant and compulsive as he worked-through the traumas of the catastrophe. Enduring the same horrifying nightmare every night, he fell into his art in order to work with the material of his dreams and the source of his delirium. It was during this time that he began his “Red” series. The most recent exhibition of his “Red” series, “Roslinrot,” which was shown at Stadtkloster in Kiel, Germany in 1998, displays a profound turning-point in his movement towards abstraction as a way of examining the unconscious, frenzied—but nonetheless ordered—pulsations of his practice as recording what he cannot otherwise process. An embodied friction between conscious and unconscious acts, between memory and hallucination, carried-out by the work of art. Expanding on the history of artists’ “Red” paintings presenting pivotal periods in their careers (for example: Rauschenberg’s “Red” paintings that preempt his later combines), these abstract works both anticipate and actualize many features that come to be structurally developed in Ovsepyan’s later—and continuing—processes of material abstraction. …. Images from “Red” Series 1988-1992 (Installation View) …. Bio: Born in 1949 in Leninakan, Armenia, Rudik Ovsepyan became a member of the Fine Art Association of the USSR in 1982, eventually being banned for his refusal to paint in the propagandistic style of “social(ist) realism.” From 1966-1969, he attended Terlemesyan Fine Art College in Armenia. In 1974, graduated from the prestigious state University of Theatre and Fine Art (or, the State Academy of Fine Arts of Armenia) in Yerevan. Facing the widespread destruction of the 1988 Spitak earthquake, as well the evolving political turmoil surrounding his abstract painting, Ovsepyan and his family moved (by boat) to Germany in 1990, where he became a member of the Fine Art Association of Germany (in 1994). There, several solo and group presentations of his work occurred in gallery, state, and museum exhibitions. In 2000, a major exhibition of Ovsepyan’s abstract works with oil and paper produced between 1996-1999 was presented by the German ministry of Education, Science, Research and Culture of Schleswig-Holstein (presented in Kiel). Later that year, Ovsepyan immigrated to the United States and began working on new bodies of work, including Labyrinth, Magaxat, and Zaun, while also beginning to produce mixed-media sculptures. A selection of his works was exhibited with Reisig and Taylor Contemporary at Art Market San Francisco in April 2023. Ovsepyan’s works are included in public and private collections in Russia, Europe, Israel, Canada, and the United States, including: UNESCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Pushkin Museum, Moscow; Museum of Modern Art, Armenia, Yerevan; Museum of Modern Art, Georgia, Tblisi; Sparkasse Schleswig-Holstein, Germany; Sparkasse, Muenster, Germany; Provincial Versicherung; Bundesministerium der Verteidigung, Kiel, Germany.