Biography

Born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1945, Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui attended the English Girls College and started her art training after school hours at the Silvio Bicci Art Academy. After two years at the American University of Beirut, she transferred to the University of Arizona in Tucson and obtained a bachelor of fine arts degree.

She held many individual exhibitions, namely at the Beirut J. F. Kennedy Cultural Center in 1973; the Gallery Epreuve d'Artiste, Beirut; Gallery Nicole Belier, Paris; Al Thurath Al Araby, Saudi Arabia; Gallery Green Art, Dubai; Gallery Janine Rubeiz, Beirut; and Gallery M, Paris.

She took part in many group exhibitions, among them Saga, Paris; at the Arte Javits Center, New York; Platform international at Strassi Gallery, Washington, DC; Art Multiple, Duesseldorf, Germany; Liban: le regard des peintres, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; the Artist's View, Barbicon Center, London; Salon d'Automne, Paris; Salon d'Automne, Beirut; Salon d'Automne du Cheval, Saumur; Art Multiple, Duesseldorf; and St'art, Strasbourg France.

Her work won several prizes and can be seen in the Museum of Prints in Alexandria, the Sursock Museum in Beirut, the art collection for the future Art Center of the American. University of Beirut, and the Bank Audi Art Collection as well as in many private collections around the world.

Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui's style is influenced by a Middle Eastern cultural heritage as reflected in the flat treatment of colors in both Byzantine icons and Persian miniatures. The treatment of space is very personal and brings a new dimension to a figurative approach through the use of hieroglyphic-like symbols and "windows" that open to reveal an added aspect of the treated subject.

Extracts of Resonances - 82 Lebanese Artists - Reviewed by Helen Khal - Edited by Cesar Nammour and Gabriela Schaub

Articles:

"I became attached to the mundane things in our lives and painted a walk on the Corniche, the flowers on my balcony, our bread and olives, the coffee shared. I sought security in painting nostalgic images of the past. But then I also painted reality."

To Sehnaoui, as her paintings indicate, the reality of the war was seen in shadowed women standing at arched windows waiting in the dark. Reality was people seated in a sad row at a condolence visit. Reality was the blind musician creating his own world through music. Reality was a woman at her broken window, with walls shell-shattered and her phone and electricity lines hanging useless, reading a letter from her distant children.

Reality to Sehnaoui was, in essence, survival. "At that point," she says, "I also identified the survival game with plants that survive under difficult conditions. Like the people of Lebanon. Cacti, chards or 'shawk', anything that had to fight to live and blossom, deserved my attention."

In her paintings, Sehnaoui insists that "life goes on, even during the worst of wars". But putting aside content and looking at style, at the elegant design refinements of color and line that mark her art, what she may have been saying is "no rose so red as where some buried Caesar bled."

Daily Star newspaper, 1998

Portraying Old Beirut through Nostalgic Eyes

All artists are a priori designers, but not all designers can claim to be artists. Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui, who holds a B.A. in fine arts from the University of Arizona, is both a professional designer and an artist. For several years before the war, she headed the graphic arts department of Lebanon's National Council of Tourism, and in her career as an artist she has chalked up nine solo exhibitions since her first in 1973.

In style, color mood and elegance of design, her paintings are all consistently Sehnaoui. As in her earlier work, she renders the images in sure, graceful line, without ambiguity, and clothes them in soft colors of cotton candy succulence. What is new, however, is the evolution of her pictures from small to big, from album snapshots to picture-window enlargements that fill the wall, thus strengthening their visual impact.

She paints old Beirut with a loving, nostalgic eye - its red-tiled roofs and arched windows; its ka'ak vendors, shoeshine boys and Corniche fishermen; its placid sea, crescent moon and evening star; its languid pleasures of mezza, coffee and the siesta hour. She paints them not as images lost, but as an insistent reality that she believes will live on.

As for the new high-rise additions to the city, Sehnaoui either ignores them totally or fades them into the background as though they were a passing mirage. I ask her why and she quickly and simply responds: "Because the old has a soul and the new doesn't."

Likening the new buildings to "curtains of mirrors" that obstruct human communion with nature, she recalls the advice of the famed Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathi, who once cautioned that buildings should never be built higher than palm trees, that to do so leads to a breakdown in social structure and values, to an "anything goes" delinquency in human behavior.

"I feel absolutely the same way, "Sehnaoui says. "Modern architecture needs to keep the human scale in mind. Imagine that in this wonderful climate of ours, which is such an essential element in our well-being, more and more people are being forced to work shut up and isolated in air-conditioned grey boxes all day long, without even a window to open and without a single balcony where they can step out into the sea-breeze air, feed birds and congregate with friends."

In every painting, Sehnaoui invariably bestows upon her Beirut buildings and people a variety of symbols that she uses as protective charms to ward off evil and bring good luck. Rendered in simple ink outlines of form, they include birds, fish, horses, Fatima's hands, stars, palm trees, flowers, even cups of coffee.

In a series of seven small oils entitled "Beirut Birds for Peace, " she adds colors, hearts and an olive branch to the bird symbol. The colors and linear curves of the forms are so delicate and peaceful, the olive branch leaves so much like multi-hued floral bouquets, that one does not really need the olive branch symbol to read the "peace" message.

Daily Star newspaper, 1999