Lot 57: * PAUL GUIRAGOSSIAN (Lebanon, 1927-1993) Untitled

Paul Guiragossian (Lebanon, 1927-1993)
Untitled
oil on canvas, framed
executed circa 1980's
90 x 80cm (35 7/16 x 31 1/2in).
FOOTNOTES
THE GUIRAGOSSIAN FAMILY: THREE GENERATIONS OF CREATIVITY

The following four paintings represent the artistic trajectory of three generations of one of Lebanon's most creative families: The Guiragossian's.

Led by patriarch Paul Guiragossian, one of the most gifted, emotive and technically progressive artists to emerge from Lebanon within the past century, the family has continued in the footsteps of its founding father, with Guiragossian's son, Emmanuel, together with his two young sons Paul Gossian and Marc Guiragossian, exhibiting all the aesthetic freedom of expression and free flowing creativity characteristic of their grandfathers work.


Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Beirut

The authenticity of this artwork has kindly been confirmed by the artists family

With his rich polychromatic palette, and mastery in capturing the tenuous fringe between abstraction and naturalism, Guiragossian faithfully captures within the contours of paint the melancholia of human suffering. Deeply affected by the tragic events of the Armenian genocide and the suffering of the Palestnian and Lebanese people during the numerous conflicts which punctuated his life, Guiragossian bemoans the plight of the most vulnerable victims of conflict; the mother.

In the suffering of the mother, Guiragossian points to the duality of her plight in bearing the emotional burden of her families hardship as well as that of her own, the suffering of others is therefore realized through the anguish of the mother for her children, and she as a medium both amplifies and intensifies this suffering. This also highlights the morbid irony of societies which hurt those who are life givers, thus alienating them from their life-giving qualities.

Depicting close knit, almost wholly abstract figures rendered as colourful stripes of thick impastoed paint, often huddled in groups, Guiragossian's artworks convey a sense of collective pain, affirming his belief that suffering, whilst outwardly malign, also tends to bind people, and acts in some ways as a universal emotional language through which we can acheive a form of mutual empathy.

This empathy is enacted, specifically in Middle East, through ritual, and Guiragossians figures, both in their regimented form and in their unison of solemnity, always capture a sense of this ritual response to suffering within them,.

The present painting is exemplary of Guiragossian's work from the period; earlier turgid luminous figures replaced by more impastoed, outlined figures. Hollowed out and less clearly delineated, these are typical of his later artistic sophistication, and display more intricate and manifold brushwork.

Painted deftly in an artistic vocabulary that draws heavily from the emotional subjectivity of expressionism, Guiragossian's work is alive with the "supremacy of feeling" that characterizes true modernism.