Leila Heller Gallery is delighted to announce the upcoming solo exhibition, a curated selection of paintings and works on paper by Wassef Boutros Ghali, titled A retrospective (1965 - 2016) opening on 3rd October, 2025.

Spanning several decades, these works reveal Boutros-Ghali’s distinctive balance between architectural order and painterly intuition. In both the large-scale canvases and intimate paper compositions, intersecting planes, subtle tonal shifts, and spatial rhythms evoke a meditative language that transcends geography, rooted in modernist ideals. In both mediums, Boutros-Ghali’s compositions are dynamic; they seem to breathe, their tensions and harmonies suggesting the shifting light, landscapes, and cultural forms that informed his vision. His work resonates with a timeless universality, yet carries the imprint of a life lived between continents.

Architectural forms emerge, collide and reengineer themselves without a narrative in dazzling abstract compositions. With subjects based on mythology, on nuanced observations of daily life or stories conjured with the simplicity of dreams, Boutros-Ghali’s artwork speaks to the pure and unrestricted physicality of painting. Boutros-Ghali challenges the traditional and leading convention of figuration with his commitment to abstraction as a modernist method of self-expression. Each piece demonstrates his mastery in balancing architectural rigor with the sensibility of a painter, transforming pure geometry into a language of contemplation and a constant state of visual flux.