At the age of nineteen, Chafic Abboud dropped hisengineering studies to dedicate himself to art. He studied drawing at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in Beirut, then left for Paris in 1953 and becamean accomplished abstract painter as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts and through his work in the studios of painters such as Léger, Friesz,Metzinger, and Lhote.

Abboud spent a significant part of his life in Paris and belonged to a generation of Lebanese artists, many in the diaspora, who moved away from established genres to innovation based on learned technique. Abboud's early work was as grounded in traditional figurative detail and later developed, into abstractions of color and form. He portrayed universal rhythm and movement through geometric forms and radiant colors. As a result, light consistently emerges as a translucent, opaque, or radiant element in his compositions.

Sharif studied in France and New York. He began exhibiting in 1964 and continued with numerous solo and group shows throughout the Arab world, the United States, and Europe. His abstract paintings are often composed of bright colors creating intense light and form. Sharif belongs to the second generation of modern Bahraini artists, who departed from the earlierillustrative realistic style typical of the first generation.

A member of the first generation of modern artists in Qatar, a young, oil-rich country of sparse population, Yussef Ahmad received a Master's degree in fine arts from Mills College in California in 1982. His paintings are often collages or mixed-media works in which Arabic calligraphy meets colors and textures derived from natural elements. Lines are elongated across the canvas or wood, and letters and patterns are layered with architectural shapes. Ahmad has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, and the Arab world, and is the director of the new Arab Art Museum in Doha.

After studying architecture and fine arts at TexasUniversity, installation, performance, and video artist Khalil Rabah returned to live and work in Palestine. His work often employs symbols of Palestinian identity, including olive trees or olive oil, stones, tar, soil, and embroidery threads and fabrics. Belonging to a new generation of Arab installation artists, Rabah's images and physical references form a commentary on exile, displacement, and uprootedness. By deconstructing and interrupting the physicality of objects, bodies, and space, he works to create new identities and meanings. The olive tree, an ancient symbol of peace, consistently appears in his work, forcing the viewer into a direct encounter with an indigenous icon. Its texture, skin, fragrance, and tactility transform the trunk, wood,sand, dust, leaves, and branches into territorial commentaries of cultural significance. In Grafting, Rabah transplanted an olive tree from the West Bank to the UN headquarters in Geneva. The work expl Text Body, 2002
Faisal Samra (Saudi Arabian, born Bahrain, 1956)
Mixed media and wire mesh; 90 x 50 x 25 cm
Courtesy of Mrs. Paulla Al-Subah
© Faisal Samra

A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, Faisal Samra graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1980. Samra was first known for his abstract paintings using a variety of mediums such as leather, henna, dyes, and vellum. By the 1990s, he had combined painting and sculpture by stretching fabrics on thin wire mesh. Both the objects and painting often include images that evoke body parts or shapes in nature. His mixed-media pieces dissect everyday items or representations to create new perspectives on myth and truth.

Born in Damascus, Bachi moved to Berlin in 1957, where he worked in a leather factory and studied drawing at the Akademie der Künste. In 1980, he became a professor at the Akademie. Working in Germany at a time of a revived abstract art movement and emerging social realism in painting, Bachi carved out a personal style in which figures and forms disintegrate and re-form as internal reflections. Since the mid-1990s, he has reestablished links with Arab artists and devoted his summers to teaching art to young Arab artists at the Darat al Funun in Jordan. Bachi's emotional and pensive paintings, sketches, and etchings move beyond portraits into images of figures and faces, beyond individuals into a commentary on humanity.

A sculptor and performance artist, Mona Hatoum moved to London in 1975; she was unable to return to Lebanon, her native country, due to the outbreak of civil war. Hatoum became widely known for a series of performance and video works that challenged taboos by focusing on the demystification of the body and its hidden functions. In the 1990s, her work expanded into large-scale installations that engaged the viewer in paradoxical emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination. Hatoum formulated a language based on Minimalist sculpture and Conceptual art in which domestic items like chairs, beds, cots, and kitchen utensils are transformed into unfamiliar and threatening objects. Her work explores notions of exile and dislocation, of power and powerlessness, and of individual strength and vulnerability in the face of violence and fragmentation. In the interactive installation Light Sentence, the room becomes a reverential space for viewing coordinates of lines, spatial density, and restless patt Poem II, 1963–65
Saloua Raouda Choucair (Lebanese, born 1916)
Mahogany; 39 x 19 x 17.5 cm
Collection Saloua Raouda Choucair

Choucair began painting under the tutelage of leading Lebanese landscape artists Mustafa Farroukh and Omar Onsi. She studied at the American University in Beirut and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1948 until 1952. Choucair charted her own course of study and exploration with self-confidence and an acutely inquisitive mind. She studied sculpture and lithography and was influenced by artists such as Fernand Léger, Jean Dewasne, and Edgard Pillet. She was the first Lebanese artist to explore abstraction from within her Islamic culture before adopting the Western interpretation. Choucair's contribution lies in her study of Islamic aesthetics through modular sculpture and abstract paintings, which are based on the essence of form—the curve and the straight line, two elements of Islamic design. Regarded as a pioneer sculptor in Lebanon and the Arab world, Choucair's natural talent for mathematics and physics is apparent in her complex sculptural compositions executed in stone, wood, me Project Architect
Zaha Hadid (Iraqi, born 1950)
The Richard and Lois Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Hadid's illustrious career in architecture began after studying mathematics at the American University in Beirut. She attended the Architectural Association in London, where she eventually taught and later led her own studio until 1987. Hadid's architectural projects are allied with her theoretical and academic pursuits, which focus on deconstruction, Suprematism, and the influences of Arabic calligraphy. Hadid achieved wide recognition in 1983, with a winning entry for the Peak Club in Hong Kong. Her designs for buildings span the globe, from the opera house in Rome to the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati. Her paintings and drawings have been shown internationally, and she was awarded the Pritzker in 2004, the first time this prestigious prize in the field of architecture has been bestowed on a woman.