Paul‍ ‍Guiragossian‍ ‍

Paul Guiragossian (1926–1993) is one of the most influential artists to emerge from the Arab World in the 20th century. Born to Armenian parents, survivors of the Armenian Genocide, he experienced the consequences of exile, first as a child, and later on as a young refugee from Jerusalem arriving to Beirut in the late 1940s.

Guiragossian’s personal experience of displacement led him to craft a formal style and critical position that were at the forefront of modernism’s search for a language that could aptly express the complexities of the human condition. From the monumental to the minute, the figurative to the abstract, Guiragossian’s work is equally marked by a constant negotiation of a wide range of art-historical styles as well as a profound rootedness within the complexity of his immediate cultural and sociopolitical context.