Hussein Madi, painter, sculptor and printmaker, is considered among the Arab world’s foremost artists. Born in 1938 in Chebaa, Lebanon. Between 1973-1986, he lived between Rome and Beirut. In 1986 he decided to stay permanently in Beirut.
Madi’s art has been viewed by thousands of people around the world at such venues as the British Museums, the Venice Biennale and Tokyo’s Ueno Museum.
Madi’s joyful experiments in colour and form have resulted in a unique body of work that relates to modern artists like Matisse and Picasso as well as to the principles of divine harmony that inform the abstract designs of Islamic art. Whether in two or three dimensions, Madi’s lines sing with a spontaneous freedom that belies the careful, even exacting, calculations that the artist invests in each work. The combination of meticulousness and sensuality is everywhere evident in Madi’s work, inspired by his profound belief in “God’s universal order, in which everything is different and yet composed of the same cosmic elements.”
