The first complete catalogue raisonné of the Egyptian artist featuring paintings and works on paper from the 1930s to his last works

This is the first comprehensive book dedicated to Egyptian artist Wassef Boutros-Ghali, offering an in-depth exploration of his storied life, the works produced across his distinct creative phases, and his enduring artistic legacy. Spanning Cairo, Paris, and New York, Boutros-Ghali's life and practice were shaped by cultural hybridity and political turbulence. Working privately and exhibiting selectively, he left behind a body of work that until now has remained largely unexamined. This catalogue brings coherence to that dispersed legacy, presenting a definitive timeline of his artistic evolution.
Wassef Boutros-Ghali (1924-2023) was a visionary Egyptian painter and architect whose late-blooming artistic career spanned decades and continents. Though initially steered toward architecture, Boutros-Ghali painted throughout his life, cultivating a distinctive visual language shaped by an affluent and cultured upbringing, political upheaval, religion and mythology, and a life lived across multiple countries.
Rooted in abstraction, his paintings fuse vibrant color fields with architectural precision, informed by modernist movements in both art and design. His bold, geometric compositions reflect a lifelong pursuit of harmony—what he described as a "visual equilibrium of geometric shapes and colors."
As his art evolved, Boutros-Ghali deepened his exploration of color, energy, and form, producing expressive, lyrical works until the end of his life.