Leila Izzet

Born in 1933, Leila Izzet is the granddaughter of the late Egyptian ruler Khedive Ismail. She has been an established artist for over 40 years since her first exhibition in 1952. A great lover of animals, she first rose to prominence as a devoted painter of horses. Her compositional style then migrated to a more expressionist tendency, before she garnered widespread acclaim as an abstract artist, settling into this style permanently. Izzet has enjoyed solo exhibitions in New York, Paris and Switzerland and has participated in Biennales in Madrid, Iraq and Croatia over her lengthy career as an artist. She has participated in notable exhibitions celebrating women artists, such as the Museum of Modern Art in Paris and at the 2005 U.N. Women’s Conference in Beijing. Izzet joined Safarkhan as a resident artist in 2002, holding various exhibitions with us until 2018.

Izzet was tutored under the famed Armenian classical realist painter Zorian in the 50s at his art academy, where under his tutelage she was urged to develop her strengths in painting, rather than confining her to any specific regimented school of art, which was the norm at the time. The way she defines her art is through her need to have the freedom that abstraction gives her which is not based on any idea or object. Most of her ideas are explosions, which indeed much of her abstract period works resemble in true fashion. In her experiments with abstraction, Izzet has confined herself to a certain palette of colors mainly red, black and white which provide the viewer with a striking and almost inescapable feeling of combustion and vigor. In her larger paintings she was able to explore the dynamism of this triage of colors most proficiently, and in them we are able to appreciate to the fullest extent the raw power of what only a scant amount of brushstrokes, colors and details can accomplish.