1969–present
Armen Agop
Armen Agop (born 1969), a native of Cairo from an Armenian family, studied sculpture at Helwan University and since the early 2000s has worked in Pietrasanta, Italy. He works mainly in black granite and basalt: his rounded sculptures of the “Touch” series rock when touched by a hand. In 2026 he represented Egypt at the Venice Biennale.
Biography
In the Egyptian pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale, visitors are asked to keep silent, take no photographs and leave their phones in their pockets. The pavilion is called just that: “Silence Pavilion: Between the Tangible and the Intangible”. In the first room stand a sculpture and a painting by Armen Agop, in the second a granite sculpture may be touched, and in the third a large painting and a sculpture are accompanied by a sound piece and a scent diffused through the room.
Agop was born in 1969 in Cairo into an Armenian family and at birth bore the surname Guerboyan. He learned to see, he says, in the desert, “where there seems to be nothing”.
At thirteen he began studying drawing and painting with the Armenian artist Simon Shahrigian. He then graduated from the sculpture department of the Faculty of Fine Arts at Helwan University in Cairo, received an assistant researcher scholarship and taught sculpture there for three years. In 1997–2000 he took part in exhibitions all over Egypt, in 1998 won the sculpture prize of the Autumn Salon, and in 2000 the Prix de Rome, Egypt’s State Prize for Artistic Creativity. He spent the first year after it in Rome and then moved to Pietrasanta, where he still lives and works.
Agop works mainly in black granite and basalt. The sculptures of the “Touch” series rest on a support a few millimetres wide, and the viewer is invited to touch them: pushed by a hand, the stone rocks, gradually slows and returns to its original position. The critic Victor Hugo Riego compared these pieces to metronomes of black granite. To my mind, the work itself happens in those seconds while the stone settles. For Agop it is a matter of freedom: the viewer is free to touch, the sculpture is free to move, and the usual “do not touch” is cancelled. The “Sufic” series takes its name from Sufism and is built on a single contemplative rounded form, for whose sake he renounces all others; these sculptures, too, rock slightly at a light touch, though they look motionless and solid. Of his minimalism he says briefly: “Simplicity is very complicated.” In 2015 he coined the word “Transcontemporary” for art bound neither to an era nor to a culture: the ancient and the contemporary, he believes, differ only on the surface.
In recent years he has exhibited more painting than sculpture. In the “MANTRA” series he sets dots of colour on a dark canvas with the finest of pen nibs, about a tenth of a millimetre, repeating one and the same gesture, and out of the accumulated dots light gradually emerges from the darkness.
He received the Umberto Mastroianni Prize, established by the sculpture biennial of the Piedmont region, for a sculptural fountain by a railway station, a project chosen by a vote of local residents. In 2013 he was awarded the Premio Sulmona and with it the Presidential Medal of the Italian Republic. His work is in the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, the Aswan Open Air Museum, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar, the Villa Empain of the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, the Bozzetti Museum in Pietrasanta, the Coral Springs Museum of Art in Florida and the collection of the city of Neckarsulm.
Profile notes