Paul Guiragossian

Paul Guiragossian (1926, Jerusalem – 1993, Beirut, Lebanon) was a well-known Lebanese-Armenian painter.

Career

Paul Guiragossian, the famous Lebanese Armenian painter was born in Jerusalem in 1926 and settled in Beirut with his family in 1939 becoming a Lebanese citizen. He started to paint in 1942 at the Yarkon Studio. In 1957, he received a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 1961-1962, he spent a year studying and painting in Paris. The rest of his life was spent living and painting in Beirut. In his lifetime, Guiragossian became Lebanon's most celebrated painter, a renown he retains to this day. Upon his death in 1993, Guiragossian received a state funeral.

Guiragossian had a foreboding sense of tragedy from his earliest years. Some of his early paintings were haunted by a figure who had lost one leg, a prophecy of his own misfortune, when in the early 1970s he lost a leg in an elevator accident.

Paul Guiragossian was consumed by his art and paid little attention to anything but his family and his painting. His mature works express the complexities of the human condition through renderings of vertical, elongated, purged bodies, both static and in motion, painted with thick layers of often luminous colors.Or|date=July 2008 His paintings are always serious in feeling. He also created frescoes, mosaics, stained glass windows, sculptures, and illustrations for books.

*note that part of his family is currently living in Germany, and that the newest Paul guiragossian, his Grandson will soon be studying art at the kunst akademie Dresden. Paul Guiragossians son is also a painter and is renowned in the lebanese and arabic circles of art, as well as having connections to A.R. Penk.

External links

* [http://paulguiragossian.com/ Official website of his estate]
* [http://www.museepaulguiragossian.com/ Musée Paul Guiragossian]