Nabil Nahas Will Bring His ‘Fractal Forms’ to Lebanon’s Pavilion at 2026 Venice Biennale

Nabil Nahas b. 1949, Lebanon Follow +

The dendritic abstractions of Beirut-born artist Nabil Nahas will take root at the Lebanese Pavilion at next year’s Venice Biennale.

The 75-year-old painter was announced as the representative for his birth country at the international exhibition by his gallery Lawrie Shabibi in Dubai on Monday.

Pavilion commissioners Lebanese Visual Art Association in Paris and French curator Nada Ghandour praised the artist’s ability to explore ‘intricate relationships between nature, geometry, and the cosmos’ in a ‘visual language that seamlessly blends abstraction and figuration’.

Nahas moved to the United States to study in 1969, and only returned to Lebanon to visit 18 years later in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War. He currently works between Beirut and New York, painting trees that are emblematic of his country. 

Blending influences from Islamic art and American abstract expressionism, his vivid paintings are known for their textured surfaces and fractal forms, often depicting root or cell-like patterns that spread across the canvas in orderly but organic systems. 

The selection committee said he offers a ‘poetic vision of the world’, which ‘resonates with contemporary concerns while evoking both the spiritual and the material, the intimate and the cosmic’.

Nahas holds an MFA from Yale University and has work held in the collections of institutions including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, London’s Tate Modern, and Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.

Main image: Nabil Nahas, Untitled (2023) (detail). Courtesy the artist, and Ben Brown Fine Arts.