Nabil Nahas (b. 1949)

Nabil Nahas grew up in Cairo and Beirut, and moved to the U.S. to study. He earned a BFA from Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge in 1971 and an MFA from Yale University in 1973. Encounters with contemporary painters at Yale influenced Nahas to move to New York.

The complex, radiant surfaces of Nahas' paintings reflect an unusual quality, the personality of its creator, both an innovator and a person of rare culture. While his body of work references a wide range of earlier civilizations and sources, his technique is totally his own, at once pointillist and boldly crafted. Nahas' highly textured paintings explore extremes of size, scale, temperature and mood; as well as seemingly polarized concepts such as nature and artifice, materiality and immateriality, East and West, drawing and atmosphere, along with beauty and ugliness. Placed between these polarities, aesthetics are challenged, altered and energized by a certain type of chemical reaction.

Rather than emerge under the umbrella of any single art movement, Nahas has consistently resisted categorization and engineered a continually evolving style through his art career. Nahas currently lives between New York and Beirut.