Rima Mardoyan's paintings, created in beeswax, are layered in meaning, technique and materials. The artist refers to the ideas that inspire her work as an engine, an intellectual energy that drives the paintings into being, forging a passage between the natural and intellectual worlds.
At the age of six, Rima Mardoyan an Armenian, moved from Teheran, Iran to Hamburg, Germany. After two years studying Law, History and Islamic Studies at the University of Hamburg, she was accepted at the"Hochschule fuer Bildende Kunste Lerchenfeld." Mardoyan was the first woman to study under the artist Sigmar Polke at the Academy where she shared with him the same interest in history, global politics and experimental concepts.
With a background and education so rich in history, Mardoyan felt a distinct cultural displacement when she moved to New York in 1981. Lamenting the powerful sense of history, culture and language she left behind in Europe, she began working with forms based on hieroglyphs. These ancient symbols not only allowed the paintings to reference past cultures, but offered a broader range of meanings and subjective associations. For Mardoyan, the hieroglyphs communicated more than modern language allowed.
For Mardoyan, content is rooted in history, in all forms: that of man, geography, science and the arts. These early abstractions carry the weight of the era in which they were produced and portray these turbulent periods in history with the contradiction, beauty and hardship that a civilization requires in order to evolve.