Aida Mahmudova attends exhibition by innovative artist Butunay Haqverdiyev

By Rustam Gasimov

Butunay Haqverdiyev is an innovative Azerbaijani artist who has rejected traditional means of painting. He has authored original works - industrial structures, humans and abstract images. I visited an exhibition of works by Haqverdiyev held at the Qiz Qalasi (Maiden Tower) gallery. 

The very name of the exhibition, Crossing, was intriguing. It was attended by Aida Mahmudova, a painter and head of the YARAT! Contemporary Art Organization;  Liana Vezirova, head of the Baku Museum Center of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; Chingiz Farzaliyev, director of the National Art Museum;  prominent painters Salkhab Mammadov, Irina Eldarova and Dadash Mammadov;  photojournalist Rustam Huseynov who also edits ART newspaper; designer Natavan Aliyeva, among others.

A lot of people had gathered outside the gallery long before the exhibition opened. Paintings had been put on display right from the entry of the gallery. The walls of the first room with large windows were decorated with paintings by Haqverdiyev.

There are artists with distinctive pieces of work. Butunay Haqverdiyev is one of them. Thanks to his unique style, his paintings stand out from among other pieces of work.

Haqverdiyev has been quite productive during many years of creative work and participated in many important exhibitions. Most of the paintings hung from the walls of the Qiz Qalasi gallery were large canvases. I was immediately attracted by the unusual technique of the artist, as each picture was a complex composition of various elements with their precise proportions, lines, marks, etc.

The exhibition featured pictures painted with colors, as well as graphics. The graphics reflect Butunay’s life in two capitals – Baku and Moscow. These include architecture, construction technique, metro stations, trains, people, etc. Butunay believes that humans live not only in a country but a visual space. 

Butunay seeks and creates his own time and space, populous with motives of his inner world that intersects with the world around them. The chaos changing the real world is filled with lines that transform the physical space into a figurative and graphic one. Out of politics and social subjects, Butunay manifests in the graphic space the basis of his own internal empire. It brings in the canvas the material world that dissolves reality, taking it into perfect in its abstract lines and embodies it again, giving rise to new forms. 

In a conversation with us, Butunay Haqverdiyev discovered for us the secrets of his creative work and the features of his technique. 

“I like industrial designs. I see in them some sort of integrity, because they are all very well done, compacts, there is nothing superfluous in them,” he says. “I often visited Moscow during my studies. Everything that I saw had an impact on my creative work. I have good memories of both capitals.”

Butunay Haqverdiyev is a member of the Union of Azerbaijani Painters. His artistic journey started at age 14 when he painted the Orthodox Church of St. Bartholomew. He had exhibitions and projects in Baku and studied at a British school of design in Moscow.

Today Butunay’s works are held in private collections in Azerbaijan, Australia, Lithuania, the UK, Germany, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Norway, Russia and the USA.