Renowned Egyptian-Armenian pop artist Chant Avedissian has left us yesterday after a three-year battle with lung cancer and metastases, according to a post made by his sister Nairy Avedis on Facebook.

Avedissian was born in Cairo in 1951, a son of Armenian refugees who fled the Turkish incursions of 1915-16. He studied fine art at the School of Art and Design in Montreal, and then joined the National Higher School of decorative arts in Paris during the 1970s.

He then returned to Egypt, and excelled at fusing the techniques and cosmopolitan experiences he had acquired to produce remarkable commentaries of the world through his uninhibited imagination.

Avedissian was mainly known for his images of iconic Egyptian figures, such as Umm Kalthoum, Farid Al Atrash, Abdel Halim Hafez, Faten Hamama and Asmahan, as well as political figures between 1940 and 1970. Working through a wide range of media, like prints, photography, and textiles, his diverse and open-minded work included pharaonic iconography, Islamic geometric patterns, Ottoman design, as well as pop art, folk art, sufi poetry and zen principles.

Between 1969 and 2018, Avedissian’s work was displayed in 25 solo exhibitions. Today, his iconic artwork is held by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum in London, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and the National Gallery of Jordan.