August 2007

YUROZ, the Armenian born (1956) master - painter, sculptor, ceramist - is an internationally acclaimed artist. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States, Asia and Europe.

YUROZ has been recognized worldwide throughout the United Nations for his mural contributions honoring the 50th anniversary of refugees and a series of six panels dedicated to Human Rights Education. Both were turned into postage stamps and released around the world in over 150 countries and 5 languages.

The music world recognized him for his Grammy award painting.

Charities around the globe have thanked him for his countless donations that have raised money and awareness for their causes. He has personally raised over a million dollars for his contributions to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

The National Ad Council chose him out of millions of people in the U.S. for their Freedom campaign which ran from 9/11/05 - 9/11/06.

YUROZ has had more than 10 museum shows as a living artist.

Even though he was a master architect and a blooming artist, YUROZ' political views clashed with the Soviet regime in Armenia, and he realized that freedom was the only path to his artistic potential. In order to find this path, YUROZ became a refugee. After struggling for years to achieve and enjoy the freedom America offered he found himself homeless in the land of opportunity. Even though he had no home, hope was his constant companion, and YUROZ continued to create art with the supplies of the street. Napkins and cardboard boxes were conjured into canvas, and discarded pens were transformed into paintbrushes.

YUROZ' Los Angeles street friends were portraits filling the gallery of his mind with the beauty and simplicity of life. Like the refugees who would later populate his United Nations mural, YUROZ was able to capture the survivor mentality of his homeless brethren when they made their way onto canvas, a reflection of his own burning desire to create art in his new home. With the success of this early "Hollywood Boulevard" series, YUROZ was walking his dream path.

With the release of the United Nations Mural for Human Rights created entirely in the technique of cubism, along with the opening of a one-man cubist show at the CoralSpring Museum of Art, YUROZ has taken his place in history along with the fathers of cubism. Cubism is an avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture in the 1900's. Instead of viewing subjects from a single, fixed angle, the cubist breaks them into many different facets, so that several aspects of the subject can be viewed simultaneously. In a final statement in an article written by Bruce Helander, a fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and curator of the YUROZ exhibit, this becomes part of the history of art. "YUROZ' innovative style and captivating subject matter require us to take a fresh look at cubism and how these images relate to us in a contemporary society. His exceptional strength as a painter comes from a natural intuitive talent supported by an exhaustive traditional arts education, which began at age ten. He later continued his studies in architecture whose principals he applied to the geometric-based compositions. In this most recent series of his work, the power of the human spirit is celebrated in colorful, poetic canvases that document the visual excitement of relationships, passion and togetherness. Even without the memorable narrative or figurative content, these paintings remain well crafted, with backgrounds that utilize an extensive, built-up, harmonic palette of aromatic color and texture. It is impossible to find an area in his pictures that is not fully resolved and inspirational. This artist continually challenges himself intellectually and creatively by abstracting the figure into cubist sections that are considerable more difficult to articulate successfully. "Picasso and Braque have a respectable colleague."

Some people might think that YUROZ has reached the dreamlike state of one of the figures in his canvases, their head tilted as if in peaceful slumber, but he continues to surge forward because art is, in his words, a "religion of duty". He creates simply because he must. Only YUROZ knows why he is so driven to inspire the unimpassioned, to impassion the unromantic, to romanticize what he sees as a marvelous journey through this world's lives, loves and hope. To ask him…all you have to do is look at his work.