1938-2009

He was born in Kharkov in 1938 and in 1957 he enrolled at the Kharkov School of Decorative Arts, where he studied under Vasily Ermilov, a renowned avant-garde artist of the 1920s. On May 23, 1965, on his birthday, Vagrich Bakhchanyan and his fellow artists organized and hosted the first unofficial day-long exhibition of paintings in Kharkov, USSR. In the mid-1960s, he relocated to Moscow, where he worked in the humor division of Literaturnaya Gazeta from 1967 to 1974. His collages have been featured in the magazines "Znanie-Sila" and "Yunost". Bakhchanyan is a author of the pseudonym "Limonov" for his friend - artist and writer Eduard Savenko. In 1974, he emigrated to New York and continued his work there, with many of his pieces being showcased in Moscow, New York, Las Vegas, Kiev, and Vienna during his lifetime. The works are kept in various collections, including the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, the Bar-Gera Collection in Cologne, Germany, and the Paul and Berty Quaedvlieg Collection in the Netherlands, among others.