The Beatles, Letterpress print, and debossed album cover.

The names of each of the Beatles, with each letter in each name part of a rotating color scheme, comprised an experiment that caught the eye of a visitor, as if the rotating colors evoked the Beatles. I showed it to Leslie and she made a print of it, which we studied. I remembered The White Album as entirely white with the words “The Beatles” embossed white on white on the jacket. I wondered if the print deserved an old-fashioned LP-sized jacket with “The Beatles” on the cover—the pristine white over the joyous explosion of their last phase. —Aram Saroyan,2 022

Five-Pass Letterpress Print with Letterpress debossed album cover. 2021.

12 x 12 in. (30.48 cm x 30.48 cm)
Edition of 20/signed and numbered.

the print is 100% cotton paper and soy inks.

Also, 2020

One pass letterpress print, printed on Crane’s Lettra cotton paper,
19 x 26 in. (48.26 cm. x 66.04 cm.)
Edition of 20/ Signed and numbered.

PRESS RELEASE:
NEW DRAWINGS ARAM SAROYAN
Organized by Michael Ned Holte

as-is.la
1133 Venice Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90015
January 5 – February 22, 2020

For those who know Aram Saroyan’s minimal poems, these recent drawings may arrive as a complete surprise. But in fact they represent a late flowering of a lifelong exploration of line released from the constrictions of the typewriter. In these new drawings, the early minimalist poems give way to something wordless: In an artistic lineage that ranges from Paul Klee to Bradley Walker Tomlin to Brice Marden, the new works, like the iconic minimalist poems, bristle with Saroyan’s signature sense of exuberant discovery.

Saroyan’s work has appeared in numerous recent exhibitions, including “Whorled Explorations,” the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India; “Three Day Weekend: Three Way Weekend” (2015) organized by Dave Muller at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum’s “Made in L.A. 2016: a, the, though, only” (for which he provided the subtitle); and “And Per Se And” (2016), organized by Michael Ned Holte at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Michael Ned Holte is a writer and independent curator based in Los Angeles, and a member of the faculty in the Program in Art at CalArts. His exhibitions include “Routine Pleasures” at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, “Made in L.A. 2014” (with Connie Butler) at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and “how we are in time and space: Nancy Buchanan, Marcia Hafif, Barbara T. Smith” Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, 2022.