Mireille Goguikian

Mireille Goguikian (b. 1964, Beirut, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-Armenian artist based in Beirut who works in oil painting, pastel drawing and mixed media. Her subject is the city, Beirut above all, and with it memory, architecture and belonging. Her semi-abstract cityscapes pack buildings into tight grids of flat, bright colour, with small marks for windows. Since the 2000s she has laid on oil paint with a palette knife, opening her cities out like unfolded landscapes. Yellow dominates, standing for light, both physical and spiritual.

She began in interior architecture at ALBA, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, before moving to Arts Plastiques. That grounding shows in the geometry of her cities. From 1988 to 1990 she painted Beirut's war damage at close range. In the early 1990s she stepped back, rendering the city as a dense net of buildings. A stay in Italy in 1990 brought the arcades that recur in her pictures. Éclats de Beyrouth (2021) is a series of seven paintings made after the Beirut port explosion of August 2020. A Walk in the Middle East opens at Kalim Bechara Art Gallery, Beirut, in November 2026.

Paul Guiragossian taught her at ALBA, where she graduated in 1988. She then lived in Paris until 1995. Solo shows include Al-Sayed Gallery, Damascus (1990), Exode Art Gallery, Beirut (2019), and Kalim Art Space, Beirut (2024). A retrospective of 35 years of her work was held at the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan (2023). She showed at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (1991), and the XIII Florence Biennale (2021), where Éclats de Beyrouth won the Jury Prize. She also received first prize in the Samir Tabet Award (1988). Collections include the Modern Art Museum of Yerevan, the Mtein Museum of Arts and the Museum of the Catholicosate of Cilicia.