Georges Guv

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Georges Guv was among the first generation of artists educated at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied between 1946 and 1948. Having settled in Lebanon in 1923, he was first educated by the Jesuits before combining his artistic practice with a civil career as both lecturer at the academy and manager of a paper mill. His decision to remain on the periphery of Beirut’s dominant artistic milieu lent his work a notably introspective and self-contained character. Guv’s pictorial language sought to give form to the memory of the Armenian tragedy and to the existential anxieties of the modern world. His art oscillates between naïve figuration and abstraction, not as stylistic affectation but as a means of sublimation, a disciplined effort to preserve emotional distance and resist overt pathos. For him, painting was an act of exorcism, a private method of transforming anguish into formal clarity. A key moment in his career was the exhibition of the Rock and Water series at Galerie de l’Odéon in Paris in 1963, where forty paintings exploring the dialogue between fluidity and permanence were presented. Among them, Rock and Sea stands out as a synthesis of Guv’s preoccupations with transformation, endurance and the sacred order of nature. Through this work, he investigated the interaction between the visible and the elemental, translating the movement of water against rock into a meditation on creation and dissolution. The series achieved remarkable critical and public success, with most of the paintings sold on the day of the opening, confirming the universal resonance of his vision. From the early 1960s through the 1970s, Guv exhibited in major Beirut galleries such as Pikal, Alecco Saab, Cassia, Dar el Fan, and Modulart, as well as abroad in Paris, Armenia, Italy, and Germany. His recurring series of underwater compositions, in which aquatic flora become metaphors for vitality and dissolution, represents one of his most coherent thematic explorations. In these works, water appears as both divine medium and metaphysical principle, embodying the tension between creation and withdrawal. Through this poetic discipline, Guv shaped a body of work that remains an inward and quietly resonant contribution to post-war Lebanese modernism.