Goar Sekhian Sanfilippo

Goar Sekhian Sanfilippo is an innovator, art curator and business executive whose multifaceted professional life spans high-tech management principles, international commerce and modern sensory art. She is the founder and CEO of Perfume Art Creation, where she has revolutionized the idea of "Perfumed Art" and delved into the powerful interaction of visual art with olfactory creation. Her work travels with artists, helping them to find ways that colour, material, memory and smell can coalesce into a single artistic experience. Outside of the art world, she is the Board Secretary, Director of the Swiss-Armenia Chamber of Commerce (SACoC), promoting bilateral commercial cooperation and strategic partnerships. Underpinned by the values of integrity, education, perseverance, creativity, independence and generosity, Goar's aim is to build on the quality of people and the human values that are preserved in any enterprise.

Goar's educational background has mirrored her multifaceted career trajectory. She was originally trained in micro-electronics and developed a great sense of precision, discipline and a knowledge of structural systems. Having noticed her abilities, her first employers encouraged her to go on to further studies, and she completed a State Diploma in International Trade at a specialised school in trade and management. This was an education that opened up new possibilities and gave her the skills in negotiation, international markets, understanding of culture and the most important thing in business: human relationships.

Goar's career path is proof of adaptability and visionary leadership. Her experience started in Microelectronics, but she soon moved on to international trade with France for European programmes and then went on to work for a family office in Geneva specialised in international trade. The experience was truly unique in giving her a broad perspective on international business, which was all about trust, judgment and shared values.

She moved to the German-speaking part of Switzerland almost a decade later and became CEO of a business involved in the transfer of high-tech medical-device technology. During the next eight years, she had a lot of executive management experience, and she was quite effective in her work, and she kept asking herself what the meaning of her life was.

A lifelong love of art, imagination, and sensory perception led Goar to open her art gallery, Perfume Art Creation, in Zollikerberg in 2020, and then to Venice and Paris. One highlight of this project was the complete development of a perfume, "Zürcher Heimatduft", which was designed as an olfactory identity and memorandum of Zurich and in which the SWISS International Air Lines catalogue had a prominent place. Today Goar combines her knowledge in international commerce, entrepreneurship and management with her artistic sensitivity to form a unique combination. She continues to reinvent our way of experiencing art, making rupture into creation and continues to honor her core values of family, transmission, and human connection in her professional work.

In addition to her professional life, Goar's family and the values of integrity, education, perseverance, creativity, independence and generosity are a major influence in her life.

Family & Mentors: She feels her father gave her a great sense of dignity and an unusual freedom of imagination. A man who has lived with her since they were 23, is the great adventure of having to balance work and family life across countries. Her two sons are her greatest pride, and she feels that the passing of culture, experience and values is known as "transmission" and as such is important to her. She also holds her mentor in international trade, the man who taught her that family and ambition go hand-in-hand in harmony, in high esteem.

Matvey Segal's works show the emigrant's experience, and are found to be an artistic symbolization of Goar's personal journey. In Segal's work "AND COULD YOU", she sees the essence of her journey as a reminder of the reality of displacement, wherein the world that was once familiar vanishes, and one must wonder: "Can you still make music with what remains? It is the state of the emigrant while between what has gone and what is to come, the state of living in the absence of rupture - and yet without it art does not eradicate rupture, it renders it transformable. It leads to Segal's “L'Envol” (The Flight), the culmination of this evolution, marking her crossing of a threshold—the inherited conventions she has crossed over to go into the unknown and discover a more magical, luminous, and, as Segal phrases it, “just” meaning.

In the end, Goar's life has been defined by the lesson she's learned from microelectronics, trade, management, emigration, family and art: how to build, how to cross borders, how to take on responsibility, how to start again, how to transmit, and how to transform.

For Goar, success is not a separate entity in life, but it is measured by how well she can make something and how much she can earn people's trust.

The Zürcher Heimatduft Project: She is especially proud that she has conceived and developed Zürcher Heimatduft from start to finish. The project was an olfactory identification and memory of Zürich in an innovative way, where the top notes of the perfume were connected to the chocolate. The project was also especially mentioned in the SWISS International Air Lines catalogue and thus turned an imaginative conception into a concrete image of the city which passed borders and boundaries.

Her most significant professional success is being the pioneer of "Perfumed Art. She has been working with today's artists, and guiding them to creating a methodology that does not just involve asking an artist to perfume an artwork, but bringing the artist into a new field within his/her creative language, combining the visual and the olfactory.