Collection: Guillaume Azoulay Artist Biography and Art Gallery Collection

Guillaume Azoulay, a self-taught artist, was born in Casablanca, Morocco in 1949. His parents settled in Paris when he was ten and by the age of thirteen, he was sketching and selling his drawings on the streets and planning his career as an artist. As Azoulay met people from various parts of the world, his interest in traveling grew, and when Guillaume Azoulay was fourteen he left home and hitchhiked across Europe and the Middle East. His desire to see and be part of the life, history and beauty of the world took him from Copenhagen to Rome, from Lisbon to Jerusalem. Indeed, Azoulay made the world his university. He has twice been accepted to the permanent archives of the Musee du Louvre in Paris. In 1978, at 29 years of age he was the youngest artist to have ever achieved that prestigious honor. Accolades and decades of fame notwithstanding, Guillaume Azoulay still refers to himself as an "artisan.”

The brilliance of Guillaume Azoulay’s art centers on his ability to convey a purity of individual lines intricately joined to create an overpowering illusion of fluid motion and life. Line is the key element of design in his artwork. Often, Azoulay will create an entire artwork without ever lifting pen from paper, using a single, unbroken line. It is through his lines that he creates balance, harmony, contrast, depth and movement in each one of his compositions. His art, far outside any boundaries that contain more pedestrian styles and techniques, transcends the faddish and the pretentious. His style is so unique that it is instantly recognized and unmistakably his. Horses, dancers and figures are treated as graphic landscapes. Hooves, heads, manes and limbs are so many hills and valleys. Shaded glades are evoked by the manipulation of parallel lines theatrically meandering, running close at times then separating to mimic the topography of some lost geography. His colors are the rainbow-like refraction of light after a downpour as they pick up the threads of his linear tale and weave them into a solid cloth. Internationally appreciated and collected, his work adds an important dimension to any art collection.

Guilaume Azoulay has also been able to count many heavyweight international figures outside the art world among his collectors, from President Ronald Reagan, President Sadat of Egypt and President Francois Mitterrand to Prince Rainier and Prince Karim Aga Khan. His works can also be found in the Nelson Rockefeller Collection.