Draft:Hrant Keshishian

• • Hrant Minas Keshishian** (born April 10, 1947) is an Armeno-Egyptian visual artist and composer of classical music. Born in Cairo, he has produced over 2,400 paintings and drawings across seven consecutive artistic styles, and approximately 130 musical compositions, including 42 piano sonatas, 5 symphonies, and 3 ballets. His work synthesizes 20th-century European techniques with Egyptian and Armenian aesthetic traditions.

History

Hrant Minas Keshishian is an Egyptian painter and classical music composer of Armenian origin, born on 10 April 1947 in Cairo, Egypt. He studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Zamalek, Cairo, graduating in 1971, and has been member of the Egyptian Syndicate of Plastic Artists since 1990. His paintings have been described as synthesizing “modern European trends and Ancient Egyptian monumental style.” As a composer, Keshishian’s works include more than 80 classical music pieces, among them piano sonatas, symphonies and ballets.

Keshishian attended the Kalousdian Armenian National School in Cairo and completed his secondary education at the Ahmed Lotfy El Sayed school in Giza. He left Cairo for Soviet Armenia in 1974, where he lived until 1989. In October 1989 he returned to Cairo, where he has been living ever since. He has been coordinator of major Armenian-Egyptian art exhibitions and catalogues editor for AGBU Egypt.

According to critic Enayat Wasfy, who wrote about him in Arek magazine in 2012, Keshishian is Egypt’s most original yet under-recognized artist, whose works “take the viewer through a tour of civilizations.” Al-Araby newspaper called his art “a unique blend of East-West.”

Visual art

His vast graphic and oil painting oeuvre consists of over six decades of creativity, amounting to around 2,200 pieces. According to the AGBU Egypt page devoted to the artist, Keshishian went through seven consecutive creative stages; he considers the last one the culmination of all the preceding styles. The neo-pharaonic style began with the fourth creative period, and the artist’s fifth period saw the production of numerous charcoal drawings, which he continued to make during his time in Soviet Armenia.

Compositions

As of 2010, the composer has written over 80 classical music works, including 14 piano sonatas and 10 sonatinas. Reviewers have described his musical language as “a synthesis of the 20th century technical progress and traditional Near Eastern melodic and metro-rhythmic frameworks.”

His ballet The Ringdove was performed for the first time in Oman at the Royal Opera House in Muscat in April 2019, under the baton of Harout Fazlian. The Oman Daily noted that the Royal Opera House Muscat’s first-ever world premiere was well-received by the audience.

The Cairo Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Harout Fazlian, performed Keshishian’s compositions in a concert named “Armenian Flair” during the same year, along with Aram Khachaturian’s and Camille Saint-Saëns’s piano works, with Simon Ghraichy as the soloist.

Exhibitions and Productions

Solo exhibitions:

• 1990 – Atelier du Caire, Cairo
• 2010 – First Retrospective Exhibition, Cairo Opera House Main Art Gallery, Cairo

Group exhibitions:

• 1969 – “Rising Artists” group exhibition, Carzoo Gallery, Kalousdian School, Cairo (2–12 May 1969)
• 1972 – Joint exhibition with Sirvart Keshishian, Cairo
• 2009 – Six Generations of Armenian-Egyptian Artists, El Hanager Art Center, Cairo (coordinator)
• 2009 – Alexandre Saroukhan retrospective, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Alexandria (coordinator)

Ballet productions:

• 2019 – The Ringdove, world première, Royal Opera House, Muscat, Oman (April 2019)

Critical reception

Vasily Vartanian, a Soviet Armenian artist who visited Cairo, saw Keshishian’s paintings in the Armenian-Egyptian weekly Tchahagir in May 1969 and wrote about them enthusiastically. He particularly liked the psychological depth of the portraits and appreciated the painter’s use of the Fauvist style that matched the content of the works. The Armenian-Egyptian newspaper Housaper also reviewed this exhibition, labelling Keshishian a master of expressionism who used colour exceptionally well. The critic Sarkis Balayan wrote in Tchahagir in December 1972 that Keshishian had found his own unique artistic language that was free from academic stereotypes. The Arev Armenian-Egyptian daily’s reviewer Avedis Yapoudjian published a review of Keshishian’s solo exhibition at the Atelier du Caire on the paper’s front page in October 1990, highlighting the monumental nature of the artist’s charcoal drawings.

Al-Ahram (Nagwa el-Ashry, 23 December 2010) , Le Progrès Égyptien (Ibrahim Henetar, 11 December 2010), which called it “the first retrospective exhibition for an Armenian-Egyptian artist,” and Al-Araby (Yousry al-Kouedi, 12 December 2010), all reviewed Keshishian’s 2010 Cairo Opera House retrospective. Dr. Mustafa El-Razzaz, art consultant at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, called Keshishian “a great artist and great composer” in the catalogue for the 2009 Saroukhan exhibition at Bibliotheca Alexandrina.