Nabil Nahas

This important monograph highlights more than four decades’ worth of paintings by the internationally acclaimed Lebanese/American artist Nabil Nahas.

Nabil Nahas is a master of color, texture, and atmosphere. Lebanon’s most famous contemporary artist, he is known for his geometric motifs and decorative patterns inspired by the natural world. This lavishly illustrated survey, the definitive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre to date, celebrates his unique vision. Schooled in the tradition of Western abstract painting, Nahas has interpreted its influences and styles in a provocative way, encapsulating the dichotomies of old and new, abstraction and realism, and East and West.

Among Nahas’s best-known series are his thickly encrusted starfish paintings and his monumental landscapes of the cacti, cedar, olive, and palm trees relating to his childhood in evocative palettes of gold, ocher, and black against a dazzling Mediterranean blue sky. An insightful essay by Carter Ratcliff explores Nahas’s artistic development through an art-historical lens, contextualizing it within modern and postmodern art.

Nabil Nahas emigrated to the United States in the 1970s and received his MFA from Yale University. His paintings are in major museum collections, including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the British Museum and the Tate Modern in London. Carter Ratcliff is an American art critic, writer, and poet. He has contributed to many publications, includingArt in America and Parkett. He is also the author of several artist monographs includingRobert Longo, Andy Warhol Portraits, and Alex Katz.