Acrylic and gouache on panel
In the late 1960s, Boghossian traveled throughout his native Ethiopia, during which he expanded his visual vocabulary. To make Blue Composition, he used wet and dry paints, washes, and airbrushes to create richly textured layers of varying opacities. The resulting surface vibrates like musical notes, with bursts of pigment that appear like cosmic particles. The artist also depicted mythical figures from Ethiopian folklore at the center of the work as graphic forms and geometric patterns. In the bottom-right corner, he inscribed his first name, “Skunder,” in Geʽez script, an East African writing system—using his signature as both a personal symbol and compositional device.
2024
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Calligraphic Abstraction
Gallery 404Hailing from around the world, the artists in this gallery turned to the expressive possibilities of calligraphy in abstract art during the 1950s and 1960s—a period marked, on the one hand, by political independence and newly formed nations, and, on the other, by military dictatorships and the Cold War.
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