Wassef Boutros-Ghali: A Retrospective

Wassef Boutros-Ghali: A Retrospective, opening November 12, surveys over eight decades of painterly inquiry and traces the artist’s global influences and encounters with movements ranging from synthetic-cubism to abstract expressionism.

An accomplished architect, Boutros-Ghali served as the principal technical advisor to the United Nations, and executed buildings in Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Sudan. All the while, he maintained an indispensable passion for painting and drawing informed by both the structure of architecture and the expressive freedom of art. His family history is interwoven with that of Egypt’s, while his work offers a lens through which one can examine the complex art historical genealogies that shaped modernism in Egypt and the greater MENA region during the first half of the twentieth century. And yet, throughout, the work possesses a freshness and immediacy that transcends a specific time or place.