Kamal Boullata (Arabic: كمال بلاطة;1942 − August 6, 2019) was a Palestinian artist and art historian. He worked primarily with acrylic and silkscreen. His work was abstract in style, focusing on the ideas of division in Palestinian identity and separation from homeland. He expressed these ideas through geometric forms as well as through the integration of Arabic words and calligraphy.

Kamal Boullata was born to mother Barbara Ibrahim Atalla and father Yusuf Isa Boullata in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem in 1942 shortly before the partition of Palestine and Israel. He had five older siblings by the names of Isa, Renée, André, Jamil, and Su‘ad. He attended elementary school at the Collège des Frères and secondary school at the St. George's School. His first encounters with painted works were Byzantine icons. Later in his childhood, Boullata recalls sitting for hours on end as a small boy in front of the Dome of the Rock, engrossed in sketching its innumerable and unfathomable geometric patterns and calligraphic engravings. In “Palestinian Art: From 1850 to Present,” Boullata recounts his first teacher, Khalil Halabi, who taught him as a young boy to trace these geometric patterns and script upon a grid. He was mesmerized by the convergence of image and word, stating that “the iconographer does not paint an icon he writes it.” In an interview he recalled "I keep reminding my self that Jerusalem is not behind me, it is constantly ahead of me."

Boullata studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome graduating in 1965. He enrolled in the graduate program at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., receiving an MFA in 1971. Boullata continued to live and create in Washington until 1974, at which time he traveled to Beirut for a short period and worked as art director of a pioneering publishing house. During his time in Beirut, Boullata became involved with a group of artist he termed the Ras Beirut artists, named after the neighborhood around which they worked. In 1993 and 1994 Boullata was awarded Fulbright Senior Scholarships to conduct research on Islamic art in Morocco. He worked and lived between Morocco and Paris during the later 1990s. Kamal Boullata was a fellow resident at The Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin). Boullata, whose work has been exhibited throughout Europe, the United States and the Middle East, continued to live and work in Spain, Menton, and eventually Berlin, where he unexpectedly died in 2019 of unknown causes.

He is buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem at the Greek Orthodox cemetery.

Materials

Boullata worked mainly in silkscreen and acrylic. His compositions are often based on the angular Kufic script embedded in geometric designs, which he uses as a representational form of art. One of his later series of works, Addolcendo, used watercolor, gouache, and crayons. He employed the French pochoir technique to achieve crisp stenciled edges.

Subject matter

His choice of subject is primarily visually abstracted themes of Palestinian identity and the conditions of exile. He frequently has religious references in his work, citing the Bible and the Qur’an, and titling pieces “God,” “Iconostasis,” “Angelus,” and “Bilqis.” He described his fascination with the square as a formal and spiritual anchor that tied him back to Jerusalem. He described the square as the “root” of his “new language” attributing its various reconfigurations to ancient forms of mathematics. This tied to his fascination with the eight pointed star. He was interested in this geometric form not just in Islamic art history, but also in the mandorlas surrounding the figure of Christ in traditional icons. Due to his use of Arabic calligraphy as a graphic form, he has been as part of the Hurufiyya Art Movement.