Wassef Boutros-Ghali: Echoes of Creativity

LOS ANGELES, CA | albertz benda is delighted to announce the first Los Angeles solo exhibition of Egyptian painter Wassef Boutros-Ghali. The exhibition also mark’s the artist’s first posthumous show, featuring remarkable works from the collection of the artist from the last two decades of Boutros-Ghali’s life. With an artistic career spanning several decades, Boutros-Ghali’s work is defined by dazzling abstract compositions inspired by the colors of unrelenting sunlight. Architectural forms emerge, collide and reengineer themselves without narrative, conjured by subjects based on mythology, on nuanced observations of daily life and imagined vistas that relate to but could never work in real life. The exhibition presents works from 2000 until his passing: a reflective period for the artist by which time he had absorbed numerous architectural and modernist movements - notably color field painting and geometric abstraction – alongside numerous socio- political events that had impacted his life to date.

Boutros-Ghali passed away in March of this year, at 98 years old, in Cairo. He painted every day until he passed.

Born 1924 in Cairo, Boutros–Ghali’s life and work had been shaped by political upheaval and military conflict, as well as his successful career as an architect. He came from a political dynasty: his grandfather Boutros Ghali Pasha was Prime Minister of Egypt from 1908-1910, and his brother Boutros was General Secretary of the United Nations. Wassef decided upon an artistic career, in which he excelled not only as a painter but also an architect. A self-proclaimed disciple of Le Corbusier, after WWII Boutros-Ghali spent time visiting Europe’s many Bauhaus and modernist buildings. At the age of 26, his first architectural project on the banks of the river Nile summoned an international modernist style – an exception for Egypt at the time. Amidst ongoing political strife in Egypt, he went on to expand his architectural practice in the region, also working as a technical consultant for UNESCO, meanwhile returning to his beloved painting in his spare time.