Biography
Paul Guiragossian is one of the region's most celebrated artists. Born in Jerusalem to Armenian parents who had survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide, Guiragossian eventually settled in Beirut after the British evacuated him from Palestine. Within less than a decade, Guiragossian would establish himself as a key figure in Lebanon's burgeoning modern art movement.
Born into poverty, Guiragossian spent his early childhood between the ages of four and seven under the care of the Order of the Daughters of St. Vincent de Paul in Jerusalem. He later completed his education at one of the schools of the Salesian priests of Don Bosco in Palestine, most likely at the school in Nazareth. Already interested in drawing at a young age, Guiragossian would devour art books in the city's bookstores and art supply shops as he immersed himself in the vast history of art. He would also have several experiences training with individual artists throughout his youth, including an Italian painter Petro Yagetti in Jerusalem, Studio Yarcon, possibly in Jaffa, as an apprentice in the studio of Italian painter Fernando Manetti (1899-1964) during the second half of the 1930s, and through formal lessons in calligraphic writing with his brother under a local sheikh.
In 1947, Guiragossian and his family moved to Beirut, as did many Palestinian refugees, and eventually settled in Bourj Hammoud, a neighbourhood located north of the capital of Beirut and, since 1915, inhabited primarily by Armenians. Once in Lebanon, Guiragossian earned a living teaching art in Armenian schools and working as an illustrator. In addition, he and his brother started a banner-making business. Around the same time, the artist began to produce portraits of the inhabitants of his neighbourhood with charcoal on paper and oil on masonite. These early works reveal not only a picture of a city but also an aesthetic concern with immediacy as Guiragossian's flowing, dynamic lines capture his subjects' physical and emotional states.
It was during the beginning of the fifties that Guiragossian began exhibiting. In 1956, the artist won his first art prize at the Salon d’Automne, held under the auspices of the Lebanese Ministry of Education. He later received the Prix de Florence from the Italian Cultural Institute. The latter award took the form of a scholarship to study painting at the Academia di Belle Arti di Firenze. He exhibited at several shows in Italy. In 1962, Guiragossian would again receive recognition with a second scholarship from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to study abroad in Paris. At the end of that year, Guiragossian held a solo show at Galerie Mouffe in Paris.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Guiragossian's artistic reputation grew throughout Lebanon, the rest of the Arab world, and Europe. His technical versatility is apparent in his diverse works on paper and canvas, primarily in oil, watercolour, and pen. Guiragossian's pieces move between abstraction and figuration to capture the essence of the human form. His portraiture includes a substantial number of compositions of his wife and children, self-portraits, and anonymous figures. Many works focus on the tender embrace of mother and child. In what would become an integral feature of his distinctive style, Guiragossian uses long, vertical brushstrokes to depict the bodies of his figures as abstracted and elongated so that the imagery echoes Byzantine icons. A genuine Modernist, Guiragossian began producing abstract paintings in the late 1960s. Applying bright, bold colours in blocks to the canvas, Guiragossian left parts of the surface untouched, generating depth and movement through a creative embrace of negative space.
Since the 1950s, Guiragossian participated in over a hundred exhibitions throughout Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and the U.S.A. In 1991, the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris honoured the artist with an exhibition of his large, abstract canvases. Further retrospectives of his work have been organised over the last two decades, including the 2013 exhibition Paul Guiragossian: The Human Condition at the Beirut Exhibition Center. His work is held in private and public collections worldwide and has been honoured by numerous international awards.
In 1991, the Guiragossians realised a longtime dream of his and his eldest son, Emmanuel, by opening an art gallery, EMMAGOSS, in Zalka on the outskirts of Beirut. This gallery provided an environment for the artists to showcase modern and contemporary art from around the world. At the same time, its studio offered a space for resident and visiting artists to educate people on how to create art and, most importantly, explore and appreciate it. In 2011, the late artist's wife and five children established The Paul Guiragossian Foundation to preserve and archive materials related to the artist and his career.
