Kamal Boullata

Kamal Boullata (1942 to 2019) was a Palestinian artist, art historian and writer. Born in Jerusalem, he lived outside the city from 1967 and died in Berlin. He worked mainly in silkscreen and acrylic, setting angular Kufic letters into exact geometric compositions in bright colour.

Boullata was raised in the Old City's Christian Quarter and spent boyhood summers in the workshop of the icon painter Khalil al-Halabi. The Dome of the Rock and Palestinian embroidery gave him his vocabulary of letter and pattern. After 1967 the square became his basic unit, cut by lines and thin bands of opposing colour. Mathaf, Doha, holds Rubaieat (Ensejam), a 1994 acrylic on canvas. Later paintings, shown in ...And There Was Light in London in 2015, turned to light and transparency.

He trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome (diploma, 1965) and took an MFA in Washington, DC, at the Corcoran School of Art (1971). After years in the US, Morocco and France he moved to Berlin in 2012 as a Wissenschaftskolleg fellow. Fulbright and Ford Foundation awards funded research on Islamic art and early Palestinian painting. His book Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present appeared in 2009. Solo shows included Darat al Funun, Amman, and Meem Gallery, Dubai. The British Museum and the Institut du Monde Arabe hold his work.