Lot Essay
Painted in 2008, Kun-Fa-Yakun (Be and It is) is a representative work of the Jerusalem born Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata’s harmonious and rhythmical geometric oeuvre exploring the tensions between exile and belonging. He has described the manual exercise of creating these canvases as a process that swings from the mechanical to the organic: he begins with a pencil and a ruler to create a mathematical rendering, and once a pattern forms in his work, it becomes a skeleton ready to receive colour as flesh. Hues of pink, reds and oranges amalgamate in a prism like composition evoking light, perhaps the light of Jerusalem, channeling the pain of losing his homeland through his art and writing. Whereas the co-existence of symmetry and asymmetry within the same canvas evokes a sense of harmony and balance and movement within a structured square. In an interview with the Barjeel Art Foundation, Boullata described his compositions: ‘In my geometric paintings, all I did had been to extract the square unit itself from its nuclear network and turn it into the principle subject of my exploration. Thus, the square had been expanded, dissected, rotated and multiplied as it had begun to define the outer dimensions of different painting series. In the process, the square’s fragmentations and reconfigurations generated a whole constellation of geometric forms that composed the skeleton of my abstract paintings’. (Barjeel Art Foundation, Interview with artist Kamal Boullata, 2014).
Drawing inspiration from Arabic calligraphy, particularly the Kufic script he admired visiting the Dome of the Rock when growing up, Boullata developed a distinct pictorial idiom that fuses Arabic words into colourful geometric designs. The embedded words are often drawn from all Abrahamic religions, perhaps to suggest the importance of transcending religious divisions and asserting the unity of his homeland. The title Kun-Fa-Yakun is a direct reference to a Qur’anic phrase, repeated eight times in the manuscript, which translates to Be and It is. In the Qur’an this is cited as a symbol or sign of God's supreme creative power: ‘The Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be’, and it is.’ (Qur'an 2:117). Charged with religious references, the work roots itself in the ‘origin’, interpreted theologically, but projects itself into a more transcendent idea of ‘being’, transversal to humanity.
Born in Jerusalem in 1942 and graduating from the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. with a Fulbright Senior Scholarships, Boullata established himself as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. After his extended residency between the USA and France he moved to Berlin where he was elected in 2012-13, as fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study. His works have been featured in a number of significant exhibitions at leading international museums, such as The British Museum, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah and Institut du monde arabe, Paris.
Drawing inspiration from Arabic calligraphy, particularly the Kufic script he admired visiting the Dome of the Rock when growing up, Boullata developed a distinct pictorial idiom that fuses Arabic words into colourful geometric designs. The embedded words are often drawn from all Abrahamic religions, perhaps to suggest the importance of transcending religious divisions and asserting the unity of his homeland. The title Kun-Fa-Yakun is a direct reference to a Qur’anic phrase, repeated eight times in the manuscript, which translates to Be and It is. In the Qur’an this is cited as a symbol or sign of God's supreme creative power: ‘The Originator of the heavens and the earth. When He decrees a matter, He only says to it, ‘Be’, and it is.’ (Qur'an 2:117). Charged with religious references, the work roots itself in the ‘origin’, interpreted theologically, but projects itself into a more transcendent idea of ‘being’, transversal to humanity.
Born in Jerusalem in 1942 and graduating from the Academia di Belle Arti in Rome and the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. with a Fulbright Senior Scholarships, Boullata established himself as one of the most acclaimed artists of his generation. After his extended residency between the USA and France he moved to Berlin where he was elected in 2012-13, as fellow of the Institute of Advanced Study. His works have been featured in a number of significant exhibitions at leading international museums, such as The British Museum, London; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah and Institut du monde arabe, Paris.