Kevork Mourad Born in Kamechli, Syria   Kevork Mourad, an artist of Armenian origin, was born in 1970 in Kamechli, Syria. In 1996, he received his MFA from the Yerevan Institute of Fine Arts in Armenia, and shifted his home base to the United States. His technique of spontaneous painting, in which he shares the stage with musicians, is a collaboration in which art and music develop in counterpoint to each other. Mourad’s visual creations are projected behind the musicians after they collectively create a timeline for the story to be told. That timeline sets the points at which spontaneous painting will be created in line with the story, and those at which pre-recorded animation will come into play a frame-by-frame creation that mimics the artist’s painting technique. Mourad has collaborated most recently with Syrian clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh, Brookyn Rider, Eve Beglarian, Ken Ueno, Kim Kashkashian, Dinuk Wijeratne, Liubo Borissov, Haruka Fuji, Tambuco, and with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble. He has performed at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Chelsea Museum of Art, the Rhode Island School of Design, the Nara Museum in Japan, and the Rubin Museum of Art. An Armenian born in Syria, Mourad never forgets his dual influences: Mosques lie next to churches, Arabic letters swirl around images that suggest Armenian calligraphy, layers of color and texture form tapestry-like impressions, and elongated shapes abstract and concrete convey a sense of ever present history. Temporally fixed objects that seems to move, brought to life by the elegant flourish of Mourad’s lines and the shimmering complexity of his colours. Human figures, when present, are rarely static. It is usually when they are at their least concrete that Mourad invests them with the most movement, as they float into or across a canvas. Even his landscapes move, through the use of color and the play with the transparency and opacity of light.           Courtyard Gallery all rights reserved. privacy policy