Irina Azizyan

Biography

In 2015, six years after Irina Azizyan’s death, her work was shown at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow in the exhibition “Temple of Peace”: she was one of nine Armenian painters of the twentieth century selected for it.

She was born on 9 April 1935 in Moscow. Her father, Atyk Kegamovich Azizyan (according to other accounts his real name was Gragat Gegamovich), was a Communist Party official, a doctor of historical sciences and a journalist, editor of the science department of the newspaper Pravda. Her elder sister, Elena, worked in philology and wrote poetry. Her husband, Yuri Karzanov, was also an architect.

In 1960 Azizyan graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute (MARCHI) with a degree in architecture and stayed on as a postgraduate in the Department of Painting. That choice shaped everything after it: she went neither into design practice nor into pure scholarship, but kept both lines going at once. In 1968 she defended her candidate’s dissertation (the Soviet equivalent of a doctorate’s first stage) on the compositional unity of the plastic arts in the modern architectural ensemble. She defended her doctoral dissertation, “The Interaction of Architecture with Other Arts”, in 1988.

From 1968 to 1989 she worked at MARCHI. First, in 1968–1970, she taught the course “Introduction to Architectural Design”, and from 1974 to 1989 she taught painting in the Department of Painting. From 1988 she headed the Department of Architectural Theory at NIITAG RAASN, the research institute of the theory and history of architecture within the Russian Academy of Architecture and Construction Sciences. She later became an adviser to the academy.

Her scholarly interests were wide: the Russian avant-garde, and the way architecture interacts with the visual arts. She published more than five hundred works. Among them are the book “Memorials of Eternal Glory” (1976, co-written with Ivanova), collections of papers on architectural theory that she edited, articles in the journal Voprosy iskusstvoznaniya (Questions of Art History), including “Paradoxes of the 1930s: Ideas of Synthesis, the Existence of Suprematism” (1995), and the monograph “Architecture in Artistic Culture” (1996). She was an expert of the Kazimir Malevich Foundation and sat on the board of the Association of Art Historians. In her last years she worked on a monograph on the sculptor and artist Alexander Archipenko; the book appeared after her death.

Solo exhibitions of her paintings were held in Moscow in 1967, 1975, 1985, 1988, 1995 and 2005. Most of her paintings are devoted to Armenia and Crimea. Her works are held in the State Museum of Oriental Art, in the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture and in the Alupka Palace Museum, as well as in private collections in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Yerevan, Romania, Spain and the United States. In 2005 a catalogue, “Catalogue of Paintings and Graphic Works, 1958–2005”, was published in Moscow in an edition of 500 copies, with essays by several authors and a text by Azizyan herself.

She was a member of the Union of Artists (the professional body of Soviet and Russian painters, sculptors and graphic artists) and of the Union of Architects of Russia, and held the title of Honoured Architect of the Russian Federation.

Azizyan died in Moscow on 22 June 2009.