Born in Beirut in 1943, Assadour Bezdikian, known as Assadour, is a painter and printmaker. In 1962, he obtained a grant to study in Italy and, in 1964, joined the Beaux-Arts de Paris. He has been living and working in this city since then. He is the recipient of numerous awards including the Gold Medal at the Terza Biennale Internazionale Della Grafica d’Arte, Florence (1972) and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Paris (1984). In 2016, Assadour: Landscape in Motion was the first exhibition of Beirut’s Sursock Museum devoted to an artist after its reopening. In 2022, Osthaus Museum in Hagen dedicated to Assadour a major retrospective, Tracks and Paths.

In the 1970s, Assadour envisioned a universe of mysterious cities populated with mechanical bodies. As Joseph Tarrab writes, “Assadour started in the 1970s with figures of imposing statures. He continued with their rarefaction and reduction to insignificant details of far-flung landscapes where they were just passing, insubstantial beings without house or home. This walk-on role persisted until the 1990s when “the figure” moves to the forefront, like a stage or circus star, without shedding its anonymity.”

Cité anonyme (Anonymous City) is structured around a man that looks like a mechanized android. It is significant that since the 1970s, the presence of figures in Assadour’s compositions has constantly evolved, being very present in some periods and barely visible in others. With tonalities evoking a forge or a world on fire, Cité anonyme portrays at the same time a precisely constructed system and a universe of chaos.