En 2026, l’artiste libanais Nabil Nahas sera le représentant de son pays natal à la 61e Biennale de Venise. Les commissaires du pavillon, la Lebanese Visual Art Association à Paris et la conservatrice française Nada Ghandour ont salué, dans un communiqué, ....

Nabil Nahas to represent Lebanon at the 61st International Art Exhibition- La Biennale di Venezia in 2026

November 22, 2026. Nabil Nahas, an internationally recognized contemporary artist, will represent Lebanon with Nada Ghandour leading as Commissioner and Curator of the Pavilion. The country’s participation is organized together with the Lebanese Visual Art Association (LVAA).

Born in Beirut in 1949, Nabil Nahas moved to the United States in 1969, was awarded a BFA from Louisiana State University and an MFA from Yale University (1972). He currently lives and works between Beirut and New York...

The artist plans to make his mark on the Lebanese pavilion with an installation that draws from various languages he has created, expressing his honor and sense of "great responsibility" towards his country for this prestigious opportunity, as he exclusively shared with L'Orient-Le Jour.....

The dendritic abstractions of Beirut-born artist Nabil Nahas will take root at the Lebanese Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale.

The 75-year-old painter was announced as the representative for his birth country at the international exhibition by his gallery Lawrie
Shabibi in Dubai on Monday.

Pavilion commissioners Lebanese Visual Art Association in Paris and French curator Nada Ghandour praised the artist’s ability to explore ‘intricate relationships between nature, geometry, and the cosmos’ in a ‘visual language that seamlessly blends abstraction and figuration’.

Nahas moved to the United States to study in 1969, and only returned to Lebanon to visit 18 years later in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War. He currently works between Beirut and New York, painting trees that are emblematic of his country.

Blending influences from Islamic art and American abstract expressionism, his vivid paintings are known for their textured surfaces and fractal forms, often depicting root or cell-like patterns that spread across the canvas in orderly but organic systems.

The selection committee said he offers a ‘poetic vision of the world’, which ‘resonates with contemporary concerns while evoking both the spiritual and the material, the intimate and the cosmic’.

Nabil Nahas and the relationship between geometry and nature: a look at the Tethys exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi.

As we immerse ourselves in Nahas's 'Tethys' exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai, we are invited to explore the intricate relationship between geometry and nature in his recent works.

Tethys, the solo show by Nabil Nahas at Lawrie Shabibi, sees a retreat into nature in the face of challenging realities.

Bursts of colour and a personal fusion of geometry and nature characterise the oeuvre of Lebanese-American artist, Nabil Nahas, who has returned to Lawrie Shabibi for his solo exhibition, Tethys. Born in 1949 in Beirut, the artist’s youth was divided between Egypt and Lebanon before he left to study in the USA. A graduate of Yale’s Fine Art program, he was a student of American Abstract Expressionist painter, Al Held, whose influence left an imprint on his artistic practice. Situating himself amidst the cultural landscape of 1970s New York, Nahas immersed himself in the artistic milieu of the moment.

The first reaction triggered by the exhibition Les Racines du Giel is that Nabil Nahas (b 1949 in Lebanon) is by no means a painter whose work has developed in a linear way. On the contrary, even after a career spanning over more than 40 years, his practice remains exciting, challenging, unpredictable, at times seemingly contradictory, but ultimately, everything makes sense and falls into place.

from the Deep sea to the cosmos ...

The new exhibition by Nabil Nahas at Château La Coste in the south of France gathers together all of the celebrated Lebanese-American artist’s favourite things: starfish, fractals, geometry and the boundless universe.
Words by Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle

Set out across two spaces at the glorious Château La Coste, Nabil Nahas’s exhibition ‘Grounded in the Sky’ simultaneously explores the wonder of nature and the fragility of humankind 

The Parisian appartement of Nabil Nahas sits overlooking a lush courtyard a stone’s throw away from the Place de l’Opera. The space, where the artist has lived for just over two years, is filled with a museum worthy collection of Jean Royère furniture. “Things I had in storage” he says, waving around the room at the goat hair covered Baquet armchair. “I didn’t want the space to feel too bourgeois” he adds with a smile when I point out the bare electric wires poking out from behind a light fixture.

Pour sa première exposition personnelle en France, « Les Racines du ciel » présentée par CMS Collection au Château La Coste jusqu’au 13 juin 2023, Nabil Nahas réunit deux facettes essentielles de son travail, ses constellations, leurs références géométriques, et son travail plus intime qui prend racine au Liban. Il fait le choix de présenter ensemble ses séries « Spiral/trees » réunissant là ses inspirations : le végétal, le vivant et les cieux. « La nature, la géométrie, sont le début de tout. Le nombre d’or qui ressort de la façon dont une tige pousse. » Nabil Nahas

Celebrated for his three-dimensional, multi-layered paintings marrying geometry and nature and bursting with vivid color and texture, Lebanese-American artist Nabil Nahas’ first solo exhibition in France, “Grounded in the Sky”, proposes two series of recent works and a never-before-seen outdoor sculpture – his largest to date – evoking a mysterious marine creature. On show until June 13, 2023 at Château La Coste in Provence, the artworks are spread across two gallery spaces of the wine estate: the Renzo Piano Pavilion and the Old Wine Storehouse rehabilitated by Jean-Michel Wilmotte. Large-scale cosmic “Constellation” compositions, referencing both seabed and sky, appear to be pulsating, in perpetual movement, while tortured, apocalyptic depictions of trees emblematic of his homeland – cedars, olives and palms – transform the space into a gallery of botanical portraits, where each appears to lay bare its soul, as viewers are plunged into the artist’s heavy-hearted mental landscape. I sit down with Nahas to discuss his origins and the creative process behind the works in this exhibition.

PARIS: Nabil Nahas, un artiste peintre et sculpteur libano-américain, né en 1949 à Beyrouth et diplômé des beaux-arts à l’université de Yale en 1972, a exposé dans les plus grands musées et galeries à travers le monde, dont Sperone Westwater et Holly Solomon Gallery, à New York; Baumgartner Gallery, à Washington; Milleventi, à Milan; Boston Museum; Lawrie Shabibi, à Dubaï; Saleh Barakat Gallery, à Beyrouth; Ben Brown Fine Arts, à Hong Kong ou encore au British Museum. Il présente ses œuvres pour la première fois en France au Château La Coste, à Aix-en-Provence, du 1er avril au 13 juin 2023.

Nabil Nahas enveloppe le Château La Coste dans sa magie...À la faveur de « Racines du ciel », sa première exposition solo française accueillie au Château La Coste et dont la production a été confiée à CMS Collection, l’artiste américano-libanais déploie les différentes nuances et textures de son œuvre protéiforme, entre ses constellations qui lient l’infime à l’infini, et ses oliviers troublants d’humanité. Il présente également ses sculptures secouées d’une magie qui est la sienne...

New York-based  American-Lebanese artist Nabil Nahas grew up in Cairo and Beirut and studied fine arts at Yale University. Over the course of a phenomenal career, the 69-year-old artist has had exhibits at some of New York’s most important galleries, in addition to exhibits in Paris, Beirut and São Paulo, always reinventing himself by exploring new artistic techniques. Throughout the years, his paintings have been abstract, pointillistic or impressionistic, and sometimes a mixture of all three techniques. Most recently, his works have been inspired by Lebanon’s magnificent cedar trees, providing a moving artistic tribute to the country of his birth

Nabil Nahas creates stamp for Lebanon's 75 Years of Independence

New York-based artist Nabil Nahas was born in Beirut in 1949, then spent his formative years between Egypt and Lebanon before leaving for the United States to attend college. Now, Nahas still periodically returns to his birthplace. He started painting at a young age and quickly became interested in abstraction.....

AYK: Why do you think the Americans elected Trump?

NN: This is a very serious political question....

Nabil Nahas and Alain Kirili (Holly Solomon Gallery, 724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street): Looking at Nabil Nahas's new paintings is like walking into a Latin American rain forest

Nabil Nahas is an American painter whose work does not so much “contain multitudes” as it reconciles opposites. Whether implicitly or explicitly, Nahas’s work explores extremes of size, scale, temperature and mood; and seemingly polarized concepts such as nature and artifice, materiality and immateriality

Peintre de la nature et de la géométrie, Nabil Nahas travaille avec un plan précis. Les toiles qu'il livre sont à la fois rigoureuses et luxuriantes. Attaché à rendre compte d'un univers en mutation, il n'en oublie pas moins que le monde est régi par des règles biendéterminées.

It must be hard to give painterliness a new twist these days, but Nabil Nahas’s recent abstract works manage to do so. Literally building up the painterly surface, shaping a mixture of ground pumice and acrylic into what look like organic forms, which he then repaints, the artist gives gesture fresh resonance. His richly textured surfaces, teeming with life and often …

For Lebanese painter, Nabil Nahas, memories of an experience in nature serve as inspiration for his optically-charged paintings of starfish and olive trees. Nahas invited ARTINFO to his New York City studio to preview works for his upcoming exhibit.

Lebanese-American artist Nabil Nahas, whose work has been exhibited all over the world, brings his striking, large-scale works—including a few new pieces—to FIAF’s Gallery.

Nabil Nahas brings his inimitable sense of scale, opulence, and sheer sumptousness back to Dubai this November with a second solo exhibition at Lawrie Shabibi. Focusing this time on his three-dimensional paintings, as tactile as they are optical,

After a particularly heavy storm in 1991, the artist Nabil Nahas took a walk along Southampton Beach in Long Island, New York, and found it littered with starfish, spewed out by the recently tumultuous sea.

Well before the current heightened interest in contemporary art of the Middle East, Nahas had established his reputation in New York art circles as a master of colour, texture and atmosphere. 

Nabil Nahas is a delight. We met with him early this year at his studio in Chelsea, overlooking the Hudson, as he was putting the finishing touches on his solo show at Sperone Westwater  (on view through  May 4 ).

If one person has found his vocation in painting it is unquestionably Nabil Nahas. Not only does he have a communicative love for the medium, but also his work is testimony to his dedication to and joy of exploring painting 

Nabil Nahas is perhaps best known for dense, monochromatic acrylic paintings that employ the rigid geometries of Islamic patterning. 

We saw your paintings in a solo show in Lawrie Shabibi (Fractals) in November and some of your older work at Art Dubai in March.

Tabitha Piseno interviews painter Nabil Nahas on the occasion of the exhibition of new paintings at Sperone Westwater, New York, on view from April 5 - May 4, 2013.

Born in Beirut in 1949, Nabil Nahas spent the first decade of his life in Cairo before returning to his native country of Lebanon, where he remained until 1968.

In the national-representation section standouts included Willie Doherty's two-screen video installation showing a suited fugitive running in an obscure tunnel that suggests a border zone (Doherty, a Northern Irish artist, was another winning selection, one that called into question the very idea of national representation) and Swiss artist Fabrice Gygi's observation tower with a mechanized elevator. (The theme of panoptic power was rather popular, in fact: On the same floor of the gallery--though not officially in the national-representation section--the Cuban collective Los Carpinteros offered an observation tower made of flimsy tentlike material. On opening night, when the champagne was flowing, I saw a woman ascend the tower's tall ladder only to fall down on her back with a thud, then get up and walk away. The installation is now off-limits.) And Russian artist Alexander Brodsky, listed as an "additional artist," presented a miniature city built inside rusted Dumpsters.

There was also an unusually large number of excellent exhibitors from somewhat less visible countries: Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, from Vietnam, who showed jarring videos of men furiously pulling rickshas underwater; Marran Gosov, from Bulgaria, who crammed himself into a small glass box in an endurance act of extreme corporeal discomfort; Lebanon native Nabil Nahas, known for his striking, colorful paintings of amoeba-like shapes; and the lately ubiquitous Anri Sala, from Albania (via France), whose video focused on the interaction of stray dogs and a lion in what looked like an abandoned zoo.

Hug's selection of significant metropolises was criticized in the local art press: New York, London, and Sao Paulo itself were obvious choices, and one can certainly make a case for Tokyo, Beijing, and Berlin as art capitals, but the inclusion of Istanbul, Sydney, Moscow, Caracas, and Johannesburg seemed motivated primarily by an idea of "types" of cultures spread out across the globe--an idea that is challenged by the sometimes violent commingling of cultures one typically finds in the contemporary city. It turns out that Hug had previously worked in Moscow, Caracas, and Johannesburg (as well as Lagos and Brasilia) and was familiar with the art scenes there. This is a forgivable shortcut, to be sure, and it did have the beneficial effect of highlighting what too often goes unnoticed (an active art scene in Caracas, for example), but the choice of these cities too closely limned Hug's rather unoriginal emphasis on economic power centers and biennial havens.

The art in some of these city sections was particularly strong. Berlin was well represented by Frank Thiel and Michael Wesely, both of whom showed large photographs that demonstrate the transformation of (and incipient topographic amnesia in) Germany's capital; the New York section featured Nancy Davenport s barely pre-9/11 terrorist fantasies and Sarah Morris's architecture-inflected paintings; Moscow's group included Boris Mikhailov's big color photographs of lumpen Muscovites; and Sao Paulo broke from the lockstep city-representation mode with Lina Kim's antiseptic white room installation and Vania Mignone's spare, cinematic paintings. But even more impressive was Hug's speculative "twelfth city," in which a dozen artists were asked to respond to "the design of a Utopia." This may have simply been a way to accommodate a spillover of talented artists from certain overrepresented cities and countries, but it worked: Projects ranged from the busy and wryly conceptual (Brazilian architects Isay Weinfeld and M arcio Kogan imagined a thoroughly militarized metropolis complete with armored bateaux mouches, an international bourse, and a refugee park) to the whimsical and elegant (American Sarah Sze's bright corner-hugging sculpture in her usual ready-at-hand materials stretched up several stories of the building, illuminating nuances of Niemeyer's structure). After seeing the work made by these artists, I couldn't help thinking that the idea of the utopian city might have been a more innovative organizing principle for the whole event.

CARTE BLANCHE POUR LE "FRACTAL"....