The creation by Alexey Manukyan instrumentally, as well in terms of form and philosophy, develops the experiments of European artists from the 1920s-30s in synthetic cubism, ready-made, and Dadaism: Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Duchamp, and Schwitters - the first to seek an escape from the confines of the painting into space. It also inherits of their successors - American and European artists of the late 1950s-1960s movements Trash Art and Junk Art (terms coined by British art critic Lawrence Reginald Alloway in 1961: David Smith (USA), Jesús Rafael Soto (Venezuela), Joseph Beuys (Germany), Etienne-Martin (France), Jean Tinguely (Switzerland), Christo (Bulgaria), Arman Fernandez (USA), John Chamberlain (USA), César Baldaccini (France), Richard Stankiewicz (USA), and the "Young British Artists" (YBA). Trash Art further evolved into Recycle Art and Arte Povera, giving rise to Environmental Art, Site-Specific Art (Dennis Oppenheim, Athena Tacha, Patricia Johanson, Robert Irwin), and Land Art which transitioned from objects to large-scale works encompassing not just local spaces but entire landscapes. All of this is fundamentally significant for the creative work of Alexey Manukyan.

Continuing the explorations of his predecessors, Alexey Manukyan rejects the notion of the artwork as a "painting" or object with clear boundaries. For him, art is not the object itself, but the relationship between the viewer and the object, or rather, the system of objects, their arrangement, texture, material, ancient archetypal meanings and associations, as well as the layers of their social meanings and symbolism.

Alexey Manukyan works with the phenomena of memory—universal, historical, national, social, and personal—addressing themes of historical and personal traumas, their experience and overcoming, translating them into an international language understandable in any country. He conveys these meanings through archetypal ancient materials: earth, sand, stones, wax, water, linked to the ritual of birth and death, agricultural cycles (which also symbolise birth and death), family clan, and homeland. These materials, charged with ancient symbolic and "sanctified" energy that humanity has interacted with since its inception, he juxtaposes with the "signifiers" of modern civilization. In doing so, he creates a dissonance that touches the deep layers of the unconscious in the viewer's perception, eliciting new emotions and meanings.

Sacks filled with soil evoke memories of the deceased, while flattened plastic bottles, pressed into the ground and almost becoming part of it, symbolize decay (dust). This is the dust of civilization and simultaneously its trace, struggling to decompose, unable to become soil. (the "Face of Gyumri" project). Prostheses represent the phantom pain of individuals and history, the destruction of a person, or a country losing parts of its body. Nothing reminds us of the living as much as something artificial (the installation " Apotheosis. Transformation of History or Parallel Histories," emerged after A. Manukyan's internship at the Yerevan Prosthetics Center). A pyramid of basins filled with soil looks as society pyramid. The soil in each separate basin symbolizes that every inhabitant has their own land, but it is unused, forgotten, like these basins. Buckets filled with stones recall the Biblical "time to gather stones", yet also resemble a grave, where stones are brought in memory of the deceased. Placed in an unfamiliar context, everything acquires a different meaning, though this context is suggested to Alexey Manukyan by life itself: a collection of headboards from dismantled metal beds, two chairs seemingly engaged in a dialogue but actually stacked in a way that people cannot use them; pipes that also resemble two interlocutors. Although there are no people. This is the project "Urban Utopias," dedicated to his hometown of Gyumri.

Artist statement

Manukyan is interested in the space filled with energy of meanings, the unity of time and space, the density of time, the boundary between reality and utopia, conception and embodiment, energy and tranquility. In this way, he realizes the main idea of art of the 20th-21st centuries, which anticipated discoveries in physics and astrophysics: the transmission of meaning energy, the articulatation of sense, but at the same time trust in the viewer, the admissibility of a wide range of interpretations.

He is not interested in dematerialization, but rather in materialization, imprinting the invisible. Therefore, imprints (frottage) of city underground communications hatches become mandalas, a gaze from the sky (celestial, resurrection) into the underground of civilization, into the depths of the earth (the project "Mandala-Peepholes. The identity of cities"), and "Social Sculpture or Universal Reflection" - these are spheres made of metal wire, resembling zygotes - embryos of infinite possibilities and meanings, from which beings may evolve... perhaps living creatures, or projects.

"It is a creative dream, insubstantial, wieghtless, a chaotic tangle," the author acknowledges. "If you want to give up your dream, then realize it; if you want to make it come true, you will be deprived of it." Thus, the artist becomes a "mediator of the unseen," embodying meanings but not dictating them. And the same approach he projects onto nations, peoples, society.

"From the chaos, which is abundance, to raise up into the light that which is capable of taking form, which has matured for it," wrote Thomas Mann about the process of creation (novella "The Hard Hour"). Alexey Manukyan, acting as a retransmitter of what is in "chaos," creates works without boundaries. In doing so, he does not tell a story but places the viewer inside the work itself, making the viewer a co-author and offering a whole spectrum of meanings within a new system of coordinates. In this way, he realizes Joseph Beuys' concept of "social sculpture," which viewed society as an artwork, and follows the path of "pure art," leading the viewer through archetypes and tragic themes to catharsis. According to the laws of catharsis, Alexey Manukyan's work brings psychological liberation, the resolution of internal conflicts through the collision of material and meaning, social clichés and ancient codes, space and the placement of objects. As a result it's charging with a humanistic message of saving humanity, the organic coexistence of humans in nature and society, ethics in the broadest sense, ecology not only of nature but also of the soul, courage in realizing intention and dreams, social responsibility, and self-questioning: who are we, where do we come from, and where are we going?