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Lot 415^*

Paul Guiragossian
(Lebanon, 1927-1993)
Untitled

Islamic and Indian Art

8 April 2014, 10:30 BST

London, New Bond Street

Sold for £31,250 inc. premium

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Nima Sagharchi

Group Head

Tel: +44 20 7468 8342

Nima.Sagharchi@bonhams.com

Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon, 1927-1993)

Untitled
oil on canvas, framed
signed "Paul.G" in English (lower right), executed in 1972
100 x 73cm (39 3/8 x 28 3/4in).

Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Lebanon
Previously in the collection of Mr Joseph Faloughi

"The Mother is the greatest hero in the world." - Paul Guiragossian

Paul Guiragossian is considered one of the foremost artists of modern Lebanon, achieving recognition in his own lifetime and honoured with a state funeral upon his death.

Guiragossian's genius lies in his ability to simultaneously provoke both joy and despair; it is this very struggle within himself that he expresses on his canvases. Guiragossian was moved by the fragility of life, and the duality of good and evil, fortune and misfortune. It is not surprising that the artist felt the darker side of life so keenly.

He was born in Jerusalem to survivors of the Armenian genocide in 1926, and lived through the horror of civil war in Beirut, when the promise of stability and prosperity was drowned in a terrifying reality of mortar bombing and machine gun fire.

Early in his career, Guiragossian would paint crippled figures with only one leg, a tribute to his despairing outlook on life and history, which he viewed as a cycle of violence, a series of man-made disasters. He gradually reduced the naturalism of his figures to their very essence, representing them with thick daubs of luminous paint.

The present painting is a rare and interesting example of Guiragossian's work, and has a distinctly transitional quality about it, retaining some of the naturalism of his earlier depictions while demonstrating the slow movement towards anatomical simplification that characterizes the majority of his oeuvre.

Pallid, fragile, and seeking solace from each other, Guiragossian's depiction of the mother figure demonstrates his belief in the sanctity of familial tenderness as one of the few palliatives of human suffering.

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