Biography
Mher Shahinyan was born in the city of Yerevan in 1965. He grew up in a worker's family and had an ordinary childhood, like so many other children of the Soviet era. Shahinyan's interest in art awoke at a fairly mature age. One day he simply felt the urge to pick up a brush and create something. But since Mher had no formal artistic education, the future self-taught painter set out to learn the fundamentals of the visual arts on his own. This happened after he had moved to Russia, to the city of Sochi. The nature of his work allowed Mher to devote a great deal of time to the pursuit that had captivated him completely. He would spend long hours in Sochi's State Library, studying countless books on painting. Everything interested him: styles, movements, the biographies of famous artists, the particularities of various painting techniques. Shahinyan felt especially close to the work of the Russian painters of the 1920s. He studied attentively the art of M. Larionov, N. Goncharova, R. Falk, and A. Lentulov. Their resonant, vivid canvases carried the tension characteristic of that era of great change. Into the painterly fabric of realistic imagery these artists often wove cubist elements. The painting of the second decade of the 20th century was clearly no static reflection of reality. It was a powerful instrument of creative influence upon the world — an instrument for the active transformation of life. Inclined himself toward an analytical perception of the world, Mher Shahinyan became so absorbed in the work of the Russian painters that a powerful desire to create awoke within him. Since his work left him much free time, Mher gradually began to put his acquired theoretical knowledge into practice. The process seized him entirely — painting literally opened a new world to him. From the hand of the budding self-taught painter, one remarkable work after another began to emerge. Mher Shahinyan grasped a great deal in this art on his own, yet he also draws skillfully on the advice of professional artists that he received along the way. The wider public first learned of the self-taught Armenian artist's mastery only in 2012. That year, Mher showed his work to friends and family for the first time. Interest in Shahinyan's distinctive paintings arose at once. Today, many of them have found their way into the private collections of art connoisseurs. Mher Shahinyan is married and has two children.