I. Biography

Born in Aley (1928), Mount Lebanon, Aref Rayess started his career as a self-taught artist exhibiting for the first time in 1948. He lived in Africa for many years during which he travelled between Senegal and Paris. In Paris, he joined the studios of Fernand Léger, André Lhote, Marcelle Marso and Ossip Zadkine while studying at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1957, he returned to Lebanon but left again for Florence in 1959 with a scholarship from the Italian government. From 1960 to 1963, he lived in Rome where he went on studying and exhibiting. In 1963, he returned to Lebanon.

Rayess participated in many group shows including the Biennales of Sao Paulo (1960) and Bagdad (1974); the Unesco exhibition in Montreal (1978); the Mall Galleries, London (1986) and the Salons of the Sursock Museum, Beirut (1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, 1966, 1968). He has held more than fifteen one-man shows in Lebanon.

Internationally, his Individual exhibitions include: the Poliani Gallery, Rome (1959); Numero Gallery, Florence (1959); D'Arcy Gallery, New York; Excelsior Gallery, Mexico (1964); the Rodin Museum, Paris (1966); a retrospective of his works, 1957-1968, at the National Museum of Damascus (1969); Ornina Gallery, Damascus (1974), Gallery Rasim, Algeria (1976) and in Venezuela.

He was commissioned by the Lebanese government to design and execute a tapestry presented to the Unesco centre in Paris. The Lebanese government also requested him to create two sculptures to represent Lebanon at the World Fair in New York.
Aref Rayess won several awards in Lebanon. These include: the Lebanese Ministry of National Education Award for the 1955 spring exhibition, the Unesco Prize for the Spring Salon of 1957, the Ministry of Public Works First and Second Prize for
Sculpture (1963), the Sursock Museum Grand Prix de Sculpture (1965-66) for different works exhibited and their First Prize for Sculpture (1966-67) as well as the Ministry of Tourism First and Second Prizes (1966).

President of the Lebanese association of painters and sculptors, Rayess taught for many years at the Lebanese University and the American Lebanese University. Since the start of the war in Lebanon, he has been living in Saudi Arabia and was appointed as the city of Jeddah's Art Consultant for many years. He has been commissioned by the Saudi Arabian government to produce several sculptures. One of the most outstanding is that of the stylized name of Allah. Designed by him and built in Italy from Aluminum, it stands twenty-seven meters high in Palestine Square in Jeddah. Among the artist's recent works is a series of oil paintings capturing the nature and feeling of the Arabian desert.

The Artist has passed away in January 2005.

II. Artist Statement

"Man is a unity that embodies both the means and the goals...
Art is the unification with the beauty of love and altruism that seeks continuous emancipation throughout life.
It is the incarnation of converging imaginations, ideas and impressions...
From the perfection that Allah created both inside us and in nature. Thus, the art of sculpture is the aesthetic manifestation of silence, worship, sereneness and listening"

Aref El Rayess - Aley 1999

One of Rayess' masterpieces