Dirimart is pleased to announce Stays together, Sarkis’s first gallery exhibition in London. The exhibition brings together twenty-four works created by the artist at different time periods, employing diverse techniques and gestures. Rich in imagery, the works offer a cycle of questions and responses that probe what keeps us together.

In his practice, Sarkis personifies each of his works and seeks their approval for inclusion in an exhibition display. Produced in his studio in Villejuif, Paris, he ensures that each work carries its own context with them, while simultaneously engaging in continuous dialogue with one another and with its surroundings. The convoluted relationships among his works generate a silent multivocality.

At the centre of the exhibition is In the beginning, candle (to Christian Bernard) (2023), an installation that brings together artworks from between 1969 – the same year Sarkis created a piece for the Institute of Contemporary Arts’(ICA) exhibition When attitudes become form – and 2023, in one composition. The installation offers a visual narrative of how these works have gathered over time: candle holders, a piece of lead resting on water, seven colours evaporating in white cups, Sarkis’s glass bust as a cosmonaut, a Curtis photo transformed into stained glass and mirrors awash with rainbow hues. The entangled conversation between these works from the different periods of Sarkis’s journey creates a chorus that resonates across times, spaces, and beliefs. All these pieces are being observed by his other recent series, 85 screams: after munch (2023). Drawn from the figure in Munch’s The scream, a fascination which has engaged Sarkis since his first encounter with the work in a newspaper – the swiftly executed oil paintings, made without a brush and applied directly onto paper, can be perceived as the artist’s auto-portraits. He then transforms these artworks into stained glass by zooming in on the floating faces, which are dispersed around the exhibition space.

The date of Sarkis’s works is always ‘today’. Artifacts drawn from different centuries – such as the image of a female figure from the Neolithic era, a stone face from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and a Leica camera from 1941 – are all interpreted using techniques that Sarkis has adopted or invented and juxtaposed with everyday scenes. In doing so, he initiates a subtle conversation about contemporary experience and its underlying psyche. Many overlooked experiences are pulled out and resurfaced from personal memory, while the hardships humanity face are dispersed across the vast expanse of time.

The exhibition marks the first solo show of the renowned Turkey-born Armenian artist in London; with the last piece he created for the city being in 1969 for the ICA. Yet, as Sarkis himself maintains, in his world there is no notion of departure or return, as his homeland resides in his memory.