COMMENTARIES

Mohammad El Rawas ‘s work is a commentary and record of his emotional and intellectual reactions to circumstances and events, personal or otherwise, happening or prevailing at the time, hence the diversity of the themes tackled in each work and hence the cynical and absurd flavor permeating his work.
“I do not subject such themes to a value-judgment process; a minor theme is as valid to me as a major one as long as the process of handling and translating either into a work of art is the same. This process is essentially one of association of ideas and juxtaposition of elements” Rawas said.
El Rawas had participated in more than 40 international art biennales and claimed several prizes. His meticulous three-dimensional structures and mixed media works offer a complex visual and conceptual experience - compelling, enigmatic and vigorously challenging. He “quotes” images from European art, as well as from his Middle Eastern roots, which in their new contexts, remind us of the continuity of human creativity.
El Rawas invites us to interrogate our experience of the world across time and cultures, through juxtaposed images and icons that shimmer with the contingency of the moment.
“Juxtaposing words and images, and visual iconography from high art and popular cultural sources, the work of Mohammad El Rawas expresses a fundamental ambivalence demonstrating both a dept to, and an ironic distance from, modernist traditions. El Rawas’ complex multi-media [works] speak to the contemporary experience of fragmentation that is at once universal, and, one suspects, distinctly middle eastern.”
(Helena Reckitt, ibid)

El Rawas studied painting at the Institute of Fine Art of the Lebanese University, and graduated in 1975 with honors, receiving the Lebanese University Scholarship to study abroad. The year of his graduation marked the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, leading the artist to stop painting and to leave his country to Morocco where he stayed for two years in Rabat, teaching art and resuming painting. He returned to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year. Upon his return to Beirut in 1981 with a Master’s Degree in printmaking, he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut that lasted for 27 years. Mohammad El Rawas also served for nine years as General-Secretary of the Association of Lebanese Artists, and is a founding member of the Syndicate of Lebanese Artists.
Since 1979 El Rawas has held eight individual exhibitions in Beirut and London and has participated in more than 40 international art biennials and exhibitions in England, USA, Norway, Tunis, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, France, the Netherlands, Egypt, the UAE, Poland and China. In these international shows he claimed five prizes and honorable mentions, including, in 2007, the Prize of the Alexandria Biennial of the Art of the Mediterranean Countries, for his first installation and video art piece.
His work is found in many Museums and public collections in Lebanon, Tunis, Iraq, Jordan, Sharjah, Norway and England.
Mohammed has exhibited already many times in the region, with a second solo at artsawa, he has been very successful in many international auction sales and also received many prizes and awards.
artsawa is privileged to welcome him again truly amazing, latest, and second collection of works "Commentaries". 

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