Jamil Molaeb

Born in 1948, Jamil Molaeb is a Lebanese artist based in Baissour. He holds a master’s degree from Pratt Institute in New York and a PhD degree in Art Education from the University of Ohio. Formerly, he was a professor of art at the Lebanese American University and the Lebanese University.

Since 1966, he has held different solo and group exhibitions all around the world. Starting his artistic career with two exhibitions at Dar El fan between 1967 and 1972, he is represented in Lebanon by its successor Galerie Janine Rubeiz where he has held different solo and collective exhibitions. Most recently, the gallery has showcased his “Jerusalem” series in a solo show in September 2018.

Considered a pioneering artist of the Lebanese Modern Era, Molaeb’s work has been featured excessively in local and international art fairs and exhibitions: Abu-Dhabi Art Fair, Beirut Art Fair, Art Dubai and Art14 London. His work has been acquired by distinguished Public and private collections including The World Bank in Washington DC. 

His large colourful paintings, constructed in a single identical operation, symbols emerge out of their alphabet and bifurcate into solid architectural forms, creating uncanny aerial like views, operating often as cultural archetypes.

 

 

About his work

Jamil Molaeb's signature paintings conceive of the colour field - the ultimate destination for an abstract painter -as a traditional landscape, and evokes through those minimal pictorial frameworks, the magic simplicity of miniatures and icons. There is also a place for genre painting, however, executed in an expressionist style, while not shying away from the folklore element. In his woodcuts, Molaeb demonstrates a unique skill to converse between parallel techniques, temporalities and concepts: Resorting to a traditional technique, inherited from the Italian 15th century (coeval with the first oils on canvas), the artist deploys quintessential modernist strategies that would be easily read by the expressionist and post-expressionist painters of Europe, indubitably alerted by his bright palette combined with primal archetypes, characteristic of pre-classical art.

 Jamil Molaeb kept on exhibiting canvases inspired as much by Western art history as by ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian art. Not one to be confined within a single style, Molaeb easily switches from village scenes to minimalist compositions with squares of bright colours. When he paints a landscape, it is to celebrate the nature that surrounds him through the reproduction of the sensations and emotions it inspires him.

 

Related Exhibitions

"Jerusalem" - Jamil Molaeb

September 12, 2018 to November 19, 2018

Abu Dhabi Art Fair 2018

November 14, 2018 to November 17, 2018

Beirut Art Fair 2018

September 20, 2018 to September 23, 2018

"My Diaries" - Jamil Molaeb

September 06, 2017 to September 27, 2017

"Oeuvres Recentes" - Collective Exhibtion

July 26, 2017 to August 22, 2017

October 17, 2019

December 04, 2019 to January 08, 2020

Beirut 2020

October 14, 2020 to November 27, 2020

"New York, New York" - Jamil Molaeb

January 13, 2016 to February 05, 2016

"Lebanon: Beauty and Culture" - Jamil Molaeb

November 24, 2021 to January 12, 2022

Celebrating Painting

July 20, 2022 to August 26, 2022

Encounters 2023 - Open Call

September 29, 2022 to December 29, 2022

Jamil Molaeb - "The Flowers of Molaeb"

January 18, 2023 to February 25, 2023