Kamal Boullata

Palestinian artist and art historian, Kamal Boullata, was born in Jerusalem in 1942. He earned his degree in fine arts from the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome and continued his studies at the Corcoran Art Museum School in Washington, D.C.

Boullata taught at Georgetown University while producing his own art, and he eventually was granted the Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship to research Islamic art in Morocco. In the ’90s, he lived between Paris and Morocco. Present day, the artist lives and works in Berlin.

Growing up in Jerusalem greatly influenced the artist’s work. At the mere age of eight, Boullata studied with Palestinian artist Khalil Halaby for five years. As Halaby’s apprentice, he learned how to paint from photographs— using the grid method—just the way icons are created.

Since a young age, he had a fascination with Arabic scripture, in particular, the square geometric scripture, which is known as Kufic. The reality of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the tragic history of his country have greatly affected Boullata’s whole way of thinking.

But even as he grew up in a city broken in two by barbed wire and militia, the artist felt his spirits lifted by the way that the Arab community remained bonded regardless of religious affiliation. Jerusalem’s cityscapes, streets, souks, architecture, and people became the subjects of Boullata’s early works.

After his exile, and until the present day, he has created his abstract works with these parts of Jerusalem always on his mind.

As a child, Boullata would spend hours visiting the Dome of Rock. He found it so beautiful that he would sit and copy what he saw, as a way for him to bring home some of this beauty. He gained a lot of his calligraphic inspiration from these moments as a child.

Although Boullata spent the majority of his adult life away from his hometown of Jerusalem, there are remnants of his native city in his creations. He faced exile from Jerusalem, and through geometry, attempts to recreate an indivisibility of his home within his heart.

Boullata works primarily on silk-screen, with abstract geometrical compositions and angular Kufic scripts. While his calligraphic works are an aesthetic revisualization of words that are drawn from Christian and Muslim maxims, he nonetheless strips them from their religious meaning and instead creates them as a contemporary and humanistic framework.

In these geometric silkscreen compositions, for which he is notably known, Boullata strives to articulate light and create color while keeping the viewers in a state of contemplation. The artist’s work is an encounter between Islamic and Byzantine aesthetic, while also a revitalization of one’s visual and verbal memory.

In Boullata’s series entitled Bilqis, after researching the legend of Bilqis, he gathered the aesthetic language that was created from this story, translating it into a series of paintings. Boullata described his process as, at first, being rendered in a very mathematical way by using a pencil, a compass, and gridded paper.

Once he begins to see the pattern form within the work, he sees this as the metaphorical skeleton of this body of work, and the colors are the flesh. Just as the beginning of this creation process, the process of choosing which colors he uses are also done in a careful and deliberate way. Once the pallet has been chosen, the application of the paint is where he allows himself to be free, as long as each color is in their designated line.

While still active, Boullata is regarded as a leader in Palestinian modern art and a scholar in the history of Palestinian art.

Written by L’Or Iman Puymartin © Dalloul Art Foundation