Shushanik Karapetyan

Shushanik Karapetyan is a New York-based artist born in Yerevan, Armenia. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as the National Association of Women Artists, Governors Island, BRIC, LIC Arts Open, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, Atamian Hovsepian Curatorial Practice, and Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition. Shushanik has held solo exhibitions including Land Sea Sky at Yant Art Space (2025), Paintings on the Sunnyside at Vital Arts Studios Gallery (2024), and Sunsets 1–4 at Little Window Gallery (2024), all in New York. She was an exhibitor at The Other Art Fair in New York in 2025 and received the 2025 Queens Arts Fund New Work Grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the Queens Council on the Arts. Her recent special projects include participation in Mystry Mart – Art Vending Machine at the Brooklyn Museum in 2025.

Drawing from her practice as a Gestalt psychotherapist, Shushanik Karapetyan approaches painting with an emphasis on attunement and responsiveness to personal experience and environmental influences. Her process is fluid yet intentional—each piece begins with a structure, whether a landscape or the human form, and evolves organically through spontaneous choices in brushwork, color, texture, and movement. Repetition plays a significant role in her work, whether through pointillist strokes or sweeping marks.

Shushanik is inspired by color, cycles of life, and states of transition such as sunsets and seasonal changes. She is drawn to the shifting hues of sunsets and the vivid tones of flowers encountered on her walks. These impressions weave into her paintings, mirroring her exploration of contrast and balance. A recurring Gestalt theme in her work is the concept of the "contact-boundary"—the space where individuals connect with and separate from others and themselves. Shushanik explores the contact-boundary in her art through color, where some boundaries appear to blur and others maintain a strong contrast. Just as Gestalt therapy integrates different parts into a unified whole, her artistic process embraces duality: structured, hard-edged compositions often give way to fluid, expressive pointillism; dark, introspective works are followed by luminous, airy pieces.