next exhibition from December 3, 2021 – on view IRL after Austria´s lockdown #4

The paintings by Wassef Boutros-Ghali employ a rich colour palette in which warm, ochre or red-modulated colourations are applied in much the same way as clashing, cold blue colourings. On his canvases, which are almost all characterized as Untitled, he allows primary colours to collide with complementary colours, in order to create space and depth. In this manner he evokes the Mesopotamian desert landscape with its topography that loses itself in an infinite vastness. There does not appear to be, however, an overly excessive focus on the figurative: Boutro–Ghali’s paintings instead operate as mirages between abstraction and figuration, in which recognisable landscapes and geometric abstractions enter into fascinating alliances. (…)

It’s not possible to classify the art of this cosmopolitan artist, born in Cairo in 1924 and living there, without reflecting at the same time on his family history: the political dynasty Boutros–Ghali has been a co–creator of Egyptian as well as international politics for many decades; his grandfather Boutros Ghali Pasha was Prime Minister, his brother Boutros was General Secretary of the United Nations. Wassef, who was educated in European elite institutions and also lived in the United States for a long time, decided upon an artistic career, in which he has excelled not only as a painter but also as an architect. His role model with regard to modernistic consequences was Le Corbusier, while from his paintings one can easily discern similarities with the formal abstraction of, for example, Josef Albers or Ellsworth Kelly. But such perceived analogies fall short. In Wassef Boutros–Ghali’s painting another tradition comes into the picture, which one could term Levantine abstraction and which is also found in the works of Salida Douaihy and Etel Adnan.