Lebanese Artist in New York (Copyright: Lebanese Imprints on the Twentieth Century Volume 1 - Asma Freiha and Viviane Ghanem)

Nabil Nahas was born in Beirut on the 18th of September 1949. His father Robert Salim Nahas, of Syrian-Lebanese origin, had been born in Cairo and owned a textile business. He had married Renée Achkar, originally from Ain Aar in Mount Lebanon, where the Nahas family came from Cairo to spend their summers. They were to have three sons, Kamal, Naji, and Nabil.

In1960, Nabil was sent as a border to the Aintoura Saint Joseph boarding school where he completed his secondary studies. He grew up at his maternal grandparents’ home in Ain-Aar and that period of his life remains indelibly inscribed in his memory. The beauty of the forests and landscapes he grew up in has been an unending source of inspiration in his work.

Both sides of his family had an artistic streak and his early inspiration came from Yvette Achkar, his mother’s first cousin, who was a pioneer in abstract art in the Lebanese contemporary art scene. His paternal uncle was Antoine Nahas, an architect in Cairo, to whom Beirut owes its National Museum. He cannot have been much older than ten, hankering after nothing but paints and paintbrushes, when he produced his first oil painting of the dahlias in his grandmother’s garden. He used to spend all his pocket money buying art books at Beirut’s Librairie Antoine and thus developed an in-depth knowledge of modern art. By the time he was fifteen, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. He had read the reference book Contemporary Trends just published by Albert Skira, a study of European and North American experimental art in the 1950s. This study, rich with visual inspiration, had opened vast horizons to him and was later to influence his decision to continue his university studies in the United States. He chose to attend the Louisiana State University studies in the United States. He chose to attend the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, with the support of his aunt Fina who lived nearby and graduated with a BFA in 1971. He was then selected by Yale University’s renowned Art Department and there obtained his MFA and his Doctorate. In1973 he was awarded a post-Doctorate grant to paint giant murals for Yale’s Chemistry Department.

Between 1973 and 1977 he taught at State University New York (SUNY) in Purchase but chose to devote himself to his art and began exhibiting his work. His very first solo exhibition was held at the Brigitte Schéhadé Gallery in Beirut in1973. He settled in NewYork in 1974 where he held his first American solo exhibition at the Robert Miller Gallery in 1977.

He uses acrylic and matter, often seashells, which he paints in electrifying colors. His large works attract an international following of admirers and collectors. Many of his works are exhibited in museums, notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Flint Institute in Michigan. In 1980 he was awarded the prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant. Nabil Nahas lives in Manhattan.

The American art critic Nathan Kerman wrote of him thus; “…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, East and West, drawing and atmosphere, beauty and “ugliness”, refinement, and well, - a deliberate, exploratory gesture toward “bad taste.” … Placed between them, the viewer is challenged, changed and energized as by a kind of chemical reaction. …

Nahas is fundamentally an innovator; … He has invented a way of painting whose results look like no others… In light of his Lebanese origins, his paintings, marriage of seashells with pigment, for example, might recall the Phoenicians’ famous purple cloth, dyed using local murex trunculus shells and traced throughout the ancient world; While his use of gold and rich colour to create expanding, tessellated, interlocking patterns contains hints of both Byzantine mosaics and Moorish coffered ceilings.”

Solo exhibitions:

1979 - Robert Miller Gallery, New York, where the Metropolitan Museum in New York by the means of an anonymous gift, added to its prestigious collection of modern art his 60x60 in. acrylic on canvas entitled Tink Tonk
1980 - Robert Miller Gallery, New York
1987 - Holly Solomon Gallery, New York
1988 - Montenay Gallery, Paris and Holly Solomon Gallery, New York
1994 - Baldwin Gallery, Aspen, Colorado
1997 - Sperone WestWater, New York
1998 - Baumgartner Galleries, Washington D.C. and Milleventi Gallery, Milan
1999 - Sperone West water, New York
2002 - XXVth Sao Paolo Biennial, Brazil
2002 - 2003 - J. Johnson Gallery, Jacksonville Beach, Florida
2005 - Xippas Gallery, Paris and Sperone West Water, New York. (Opium and Candy)

Collective exhibitions:

1977 - 13th annual exhibition of Art on Paper, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
1979 - Paintings on Loan from Private Collections, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
1979 - New York Now, Phoenix Museum, Arizona.
1979 - Basel Art Fair, Switzerland.
1980 - Subject Space, Pratt Institute Gallery, New York.
1981 - Studio Museum of Harlem, New York.
1983 - Twentieth Century Art from the Metropolitan Museum, Queens Museum, New York.
1987 - Razzle Dazzle, SSC&B Worldwide Advertising, New York.
1987 - Art against Aids, benefit auction organized by Livet-Reichard, New York.
1988 - American Baroque, Holly Solomon Gallery, New York.
1988 - Arco, Madrid, Galerie Montenay, Paris.
1989 - Chicago Art Fair, Galerie Montenay, Paris.
1993 - Edward Thorp Gallery, New York.
1994 - Brian Gross Gallery, San Francisco, California.
1996 - Sperone Westwater, New York.
1997 - Galerie Tanit, Munich and Baumgartner Galleries, Washington D.C.
1998 - FIAC, Paris Sperone Westwater, New York.
1999 - Group Exhibition, Sperone Westwater, New York.
1999 - FIAC, Paris Sperone Westwater, NewYork.
- October 1999 to January 2000 Souvenirs: Collecting, Memory, and Material Culture, The Museum Guild Hall, New York.
- April to June 2000 Arte Americana; Ultimo Decennio, Museo d’Arte della Citta di Ravenna, Ravenna, Italy.
- June to July 2000 Le Temps Fractal, Galerie Xippas, Paris.
- May to June 2001 Painting Abstraction ll, New York Studio School, New York.
- November to December 2001 Green on Greene, Sperone Westwater, New York.
- January to March 2002 American Fractals, Blanden Memorial Art Museum, Fort Dodge, Iowa.
- March to June 2002 XXVth Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil.
- March to April 2002 Invitational Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture, American Academy of Arts and letters, New York.
- May to June 2002 Blobs, Wiggles and Dots, Webs and Crustillations, The Work Space, New York.
He also designed sets for the ballet Occasional Encounter for the Jennifer Muller Dance Company in 1988.