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Aref El Rayess Foundation

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The Artist

Biography

Aref El Rayess (1928–2005) was a Lebanese painter, sculptor and writer, and a leading figure of modern art in the Arab world. Born in Aley, Mount Lebanon, he began painting at the age of eleven and held his first exhibition in Beirut in 1948. Over the following decades he lived and worked in Senegal, Paris, Florence, Rome, New York, Mexico, Algeria and Saudi Arabia, absorbing each place into a restless, constantly changing body of work: portraits and landscapes of Casamance, abstraction, politically committed painting, monumental public sculpture and, in his final years, collage. A co-founder of the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University and an active figure at Dar El Fan in Beirut, he was as engaged in political and intellectual life as in the studio. His work is held by the Sursock Museum, the Barjeel Art Foundation and UNESCO, among others.

Aley and first exhibition

Aref El Rayess was born on 24 October 1928 in Aley, Mount Lebanon, to Najib El Rayess and Latifeh Abi Rafeh. He began painting with his mother at the age of eleven. At the Collège Saint-Joseph in Antoura he formed a lasting friendship with Kamal Jumblatt, and as a young man he was drawn to the writer Mikhail Naimy, whom he visited regularly at his retreat in Baskinta. In 1948, aged nineteen, he held his first exhibition at the American University of Beirut.

Senegal and Paris

At the end of 1948 he joined his father in Dakar. His years between Senegal and Paris produced a rich body of drawings, watercolours, gouaches and paintings of the landscapes and people of Casamance, portraits made from within the community rather than from outside it. In Paris he studied in the free academies of Fernand Léger, André Lhote and La Grande Chaumière, learned engraving at Johnny Friedlaender's workshop, and tried his hand at theatre and mime. He studied the Phoenician, Assyrian, Pharaonic, Byzantine and Arab collections at the Louvre and worked alongside Lebanese artists in Paris including Etel Adnan, Chafic Abboud and Saloua Raouda Choucair.

Beirut and Italy

Back in Lebanon in the mid-1950s, he designed the cartoon for Signes de Cadmus, an Aubusson tapestry commissioned for UNESCO, and won the National Education Prize at the UNESCO Salon. A scholarship from the Italian government took him to Florence in 1960 and then Rome, where he studied painting and sculpture and exhibited with Galleria Numero and Galleria Pogliani. In Italy he began combining paint with other materials, including sand, plaster, stone and molten glass.

New York and Mexico

Commissioned to produce two monumental sculptures for the Lebanese pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair, he travelled to the United States in 1964 at the invitation of the US government. In New York he met Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Hofmann and Frederick Kiesler. He then exhibited at the Excelsior Gallery in Mexico City, where he met Rufino Tamayo. In 1965 he won the first prize for sculpture and painting at the Sursock Museum's Autumn Salon in Beirut.

Art and politics in Beirut

Returning to Lebanon, he helped found the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University, where he taught until 1980, and was an active board member of Dar El Fan, the cultural centre founded by his friend Janine Rubeiz. The Arab defeat of 1967 marked a turning point: exhibitions such as Sang et Liberté (1968) and Amour, Mort, Révolution (1970) placed political commitment at the centre of his work. He designed stage sets, including for the Rahbani brothers at the Baalbeck Festival, took part in congresses of Arab artists across the region, and in 1972 published a political manifesto, With Whom and Against Whom? At the invitation of the Algerian government he exhibited in Algiers in 1976, and his drawings of the first years of the Lebanese Civil War were published as The Road to Peace.

Saudi Arabia

In 1981 he moved to Jeddah, where he took part in the city's programme of public sculpture. His 28-metre aluminium Column of Light was installed in Jeddah in 1981 and O Seigneur in Tabouk in 1983, alongside works for Riyadh and ambitious architectural projects. The desert became a major subject: a series of landscapes of great stillness and spiritual intensity. In 1983 he received the Targa Europa prize in Rome for his body of work.

Return to Aley

After years of travel in Europe, Morocco and Venezuela, he settled again in Lebanon in the early 1990s, living and working between Beirut and Aley. He continued to exhibit regularly, organised the first International Sculpture Symposium in Aley in 1999, and in his last years worked obsessively on collage. He died in Aley on 27 January 2005.

Legacy

In his will, Aref El Rayess hoped that his house in Aley would become a place for learning, producing and exhibiting art. The Aref El Rayess Foundation, established by his daughter Hala El Rayess in 2015, works towards that aim. Since 2019 his estate has been represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, and his work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Sharjah Art Foundation (2022) and IVAM, Valencia (2023). The first monograph on his work was published in 2024.