Represented
Sona Petrosyan
b. 1980, Yerevan
Lives and works in Berlin
Graphite drawings of buildings that were designed and never built, reconstructed from surviving specification documents.
Sona Petrosyan draws buildings that do not exist and never did. Her sources are the paper remains of unbuilt architecture: tender documents, structural calculations, materials schedules, the correspondence between an engineer and a ministry about a load that will never be carried. She works mostly with Soviet-era projects from the Caucasus and Central Asia, and increasingly with cancelled European civic commissions from the 1970s.
There are usually no drawings left, only specifications. Petrosyan reconstructs the building from the numbers, which means the finished image is an interpretation rather than a reproduction. She is open about the guesswork and lists the sources on the verso of each sheet, including the points at which she had to invent.
The drawings are graphite on heavy Fabriano, worked over weeks, with a tonal range that stays deliberately narrow so that nothing in the image asserts itself as more real than the rest. They are drawn at a consistent scale and always in the same three quarter view, an architectural convention that flattens the difference between a proposal and a photograph.
Second Alphabet, opening at Hazenstraat in September, is her first solo exhibition in the Netherlands. Petrosyan studied at the Yerevan State Academy of Fine Arts and at the Städelschule. Her work is in the collections of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Wende Museum and Kumu Art Museum. She joined the gallery in 2023.
