Egyptian artist Chant Avedissian has passed away

On Wednesday, October 24 in the city of Cairo, the Egyptian artist of Armenian origin Chant Avedissian passed away at the age of 67, after spending the last three years battling cancer. Casa Árabe devoted a retrospective exhibition to his work at its Madrid and Cordoba headquarters from October 2017 through July 2018.

Just one year before his death, on October 19, 2017, Casa Árabe held the official opening at its Madrid headquarters of a retrospective exhibition titled “Chant Avedissian: A Levantine headed East,” with the cooperation of the Sabrina Amrani Gallery in Madrid. At the exhibition, a wide variety of the work by this artist essential to the modern and contemporary art scene in the Arab world could be seen. This showing, the artist’s first retrospective exhibition to be seen in Spain or in Europe, was presented afterwards at the Casa Árabe headquarters in Cordoba, where it was on display until July of this year.
 
Included in the exhibition were some of his famous “Cairo Stencils,” a full iconographic and analytical compendium of Egypt’s social and cultural history, which conferred the artist with great recognition in the international arena, using a pop-art style to represent cultural figures from the Arab world in the decades of the 1940’s through 1970’s, including Umm Kulthum, Asmahan, Farid Al Atrash and Faten Hamama. Along with these, other works were presented, as well. Though more recently produced, they included main topics which concerned the artist since he completed his studies in the decorative arts and textile design. He dealt with reflection on the process of formation and reproduction of basic geometries and ornamental patterns, which constitute the cultural foundation of many different civilizations. These reflections were the result of the artist’s desire to break away from Western academic art and show the particular claim he stakes on Eastern cultures, with all their diversity and breadth of scope.
 
Throughout his career, Avedissian’s work could be seen at 25 solo exhibitions put on at sites like the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution; the British Museum (London); Tropenmuseum (Amsterdam); National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh), and the National Gallery of Jordan.
 
Source: Casa Árabe, Ahram