Guv, Georges Koukejian known as

Adana (Tukey), 1918-Paris 1990

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Guv came to Lebanon in December 1923. He studied at the Ecole Saint-Grégoire, then with the Jesuits, and enrolled at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) from 1946-1948. Later he became a civil servant at the Lebanese Tobacco and Tombacs Public Company.

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Guv sought to give shape to his obsessions: the Armenian tragedy and the anguish of the modern world. 

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For him, pictorial expression was a means of keeping his distance, of not falling into drama. He was close to naivety and to abstraction, which did not come from the source of what he was expressing, but from this use of exorcism, as a palliative for real anguish.

Guv was one of the first scholars of ALBA, but he did not take part in the traditional social and cultural cycle, despite his diverse deliveries to art salons. 

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Leading parallel lives between his professional activity and his career as a painter, he also managed a paper mill while teaching at ALBA. He gave himself a solitary explanation, on which he constructed the system of his painting. 

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In Beirut he exhibited in 1962 at the Pikal Gallery; in 1963 at the Alecco Saab Gallery; in 1964 at Gallery One; in 1965 and 1971 at the Cassia Gallery; in 1969 in Dar el Fan and in 1972 at the Modulart Gallery.