Story of Art II: The Great Obsessions – Standing Together, Paul Guiragossian

Bassam Freiha Art Foundation’s monthly lecture series, led by Dr Michaela Watrelot, BFAF Curator and Director of Exhibitions, returns with a second series – this one on individual artists rather than art movements. Nine monthly lectures, running to next June, will each look closely at a single artist whose work was shaped by a figure, a place, a face or an artistic problem to which they kept returning.

This opener considers Paul Guiragossian, subject of a current exhibition at BFAF. Guiragossian made the human figure the core of his visual language; the lecture traces the figure from intimate portraits of his mother and family to increasingly distilled compositions in which individual bodies merge into a collective human presence. Even as the figure dissolves into upright passages of colour and gesture, humanity never disappears.

Image: Paul Guiragossian, L’Echarpe (1990)