ORKHAN HUSEYNOV
Orkhan Huseynov graduated from Faculty of Ceramic Design at the Azimzadeh State Art College in Baku in 1995, and from the Faculty of Ceramic Design at Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Art in 1999. He received his Master’s degree in 2000 from the Faculty of Art History and Theory at the Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Art in Baku. He works in the fields of installation, painting and video.
Orkhan Huseynov is an artist who is equally prolific in painting, drawing and many other media. From the outset, the focus of his work became his love of his country’s folk tradition and history. Culture, art, everyday life, monuments, and traditional games – all found reflection in his works. For example, he devoted an entire series to pre-Revolutionary Baku: the Governor’s Garden, oil fields, night-time Torgovaya street, restaurants, law firms, markets, the private lives of the city’s inhabitants. All this was wrought with elegance, taste and humour, as well as, importantly, with great historical accuracy.
Civil themes of a more serious nature also find expression in his work – the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Azerbaijan and its history. However, Huseynov’s works reach much more widely in geographic and temporal terms and his themes achieve universality. His conceptual work is similarly ambitious. For example, Sabir and Splash are planar objects made of Plexiglas in which monochromatic colour emphasizes the graphic qualities, while the clearly delineated lines accentuate their poster-like presence. Splash invites the viewer to meditate and to reach his own conclusion. Sabir on the other hand is a tribute to the memory of the genius Azeri poet-satirist Sabir. The drop of blood on the poet’s lips could be explained by his words spoken on this deathbed: “I laid my flesh down for my people. But if God would give me more time, I would lay my bones down too”.