June 11 – July 8, 2026
Opening: Thursday, June 11, 7 PM
Cassia House presents A Tale of Two Cities, a solo exhibition by Alejandro Avakian bringing together works shaped by the encounter between Buenos Aires and New York: two cities that appear as experience, memory, visual rhythm and ways of inhabiting the world.
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The exhibition proposes a journey through painting of great gestural intensity, where matter, color and line construct an expanding image. Avakian begins with the language of Abstract Expressionism, but shifts it toward a situated experience: streets, bodies, routes, urban tensions and personal memories enter the canvas as living forces.
Alejandro Avakian constructs his identity and his work within the convulsive and dynamic space of the encounter between two great cities: Buenos Aires and New York. In them, or between them, he unfolds a universe that names and redefines them as a mixture of sensations, colors and lived experiences.
New York and Buenos Aires do not appear merely as settings; they are visual rhythms and distinct ways of inhabiting the world. Avakian appropriates the quintessential language of New York, Abstract Expressionism, but he does not adopt it as a “universal language” or as pure emotional release. Instead, he treats it as a language taken, intervened and returned to the world with concrete anchors: cities, routes, memory, bodies, urban history.
His painting absorbs the real. It takes a language historically associated with the autonomy of form and returns it to the terrain of concrete experience by incorporating a sensitivity deeply connected to Buenos Aires: a bodily memory of the street, a humanity that persists even within chaos. Where Abstract Expressionism often aspired to a universal experience or to a formal theory of painting, Avakian insists on keeping his feet on the ground.
In this way, his poetics are crossed by an inexorable humanity transmitted in every stain and in every decision to place on the canvas the precise instant of play, creation and experience. His paintings do not seek to illustrate theories about painting; they seek to transmit a living experience. They are not an abstraction stripped of social meaning, but works born from that very experience: daughters of the history of those two cities.
- Catalina Bagnato Irigoyen
A Tale of Two Cities brings together monumental works and pieces of strong expressive charge, where abstraction becomes a way of narrating without illustrating. The image does not describe a place literally: it condenses it, tensions it and returns it as physical experience. In that crossing, Avakian’s painting sustains a direct, intense and profoundly human presence.
The exhibition invites viewers to encounter one of the great names of Argentine expressive abstraction up close, in a show where each work demands to be experienced in person, through the body, the gaze and scale.
