Britt Boutros-Ghali: Life in Colour

BRITT BOUTROS-GHALI: LIFE IN COLOUR
2nd October, 2025 – 20th October, 2025
Varvara Roza Galleries
8 Duke Street
St. James’s,
London SW1Y 6BN

Norwegian-born artist Britt Boutros-Ghali, long celebrated in Egypt and beyond, brings six decades of postwar abstraction to Varvara Roza Galleries.

Varvara Roza Galleries, in collaboration with TRAFFICARTS, will present the first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom of Britt Boutros-Ghali, the internationally recognised abstract painter whose career spans more than sixty years.

Born in 1937 in Svolvær, Norway, Boutros-Ghali grew up amid the shifting northern light that would shape her visual language. She began painting during the long winters of postwar Europe, and over the decades has forged a singular style that merges gestural abstraction with cultural resonance.

Since the early 1970s, following her marriage to Raouf Boutros-Ghali — brother of the former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali — she has lived primarily in Egypt, working between studios in Cairo and the North Coast near Alexandria. Her Agami residence, filled with mosaics and murals, has become a gathering point for collectors, curators and cultural figures.

Boutros-Ghali first exhibited in Paris in 1962 and has since shown internationally. Her works are held in prominent public and private collections, among them the Museum of Modern Art in Egypt and the Queen Noor Museum of Modern Art in Amman, Jordan. Recognition of her career has come with significant honours: Norway’s St. Olav’s Order in 1996, the Slovak Presidential Order for Art and Culture in 2010, and, most recently, a lifetime achievement award from Egypt’s National Council for Women in 2023.

Her celebrated Women of My World series demonstrates her capacity to channel both spontaneity and physicality, portraying feminine strength through layered colour, fabric and light. Influenced by action painting and colour field abstraction, her canvases often resist fixed interpretation, instead offering viewers what she calls “a place of freedom.”

“I don’t want to paint suffering, there’s too much of that in the world already,” Boutros-Ghali has said. “I want the paintings to be healing.”

Now in her 88th year, the artist continues to work on a remarkable scale. The London exhibition this October will feature recent large canvases that reaffirm her position as one of the most significant abstract painters to emerge from the Middle East.

BRITT BOUTROS-GHALI: LIFE IN COLOUR opens on the 2nd of October, 2025 until the 20th of October, 2025 at Varvara Roza Galleries

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©2025 Britt Boutros-Ghali, Varvara Roza Galleries