For fourth-generation artist and second-generation Armenian American, Anna Kalachyan, making art is a way of connecting people through storytelling. Encompassing both sweeping historical narratives and the intimate minutiae of everyday life, Kalachyan’s body of work delves into the curious and endless complexity of the human experience. Woven into her figurative and decorative series alike, the touchstones of empathy and human connection expand across the boundaries of representation and abstraction.

In her figurative work, Kalachyan seeks to re-center historical narratives that face burial or erasure. Informed by her experiences as both a descendant of the Armenian diaspora, and a life-long Los Angeles resident, Kalachyan uses her uniquely stylized figurative paintings to represent marginalized or forgotten cultural histories. By telling the complex stories of triumph, beauty, and humanity that are all too frequently left out of Western colonial record, her works champion a more complete picture of cultures like hers that face flattening at the hands of imperialism.

In Kalachyan’s decorative, more abstracted series, her fascination with the human experience remains a central theme that threads through her body of work. In her ongoing ‘Pieces’ series, highly stylized faces in profile dwell in environments populated by abstracted forms, serving as microcosms of daily life that feel at once deeply intimate and universally accessible.