Ben Brown Fine Arts is thrilled to announce that Nabil Nahas has been selected to represent Lebanon at the 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia, running from 9 May to 22 November 2026.
Commissioned and curated by Nada Ghandour and produced in collaboration with the Lebanese Visual Art Association (LVAA), this marks a significant milestone in Nahas’s distinguished career. A defining figure in Lebanese contemporary art, his practice unites abstraction and figuration in luminous works that echo the rhythms of nature and the vastness of the cosmos.
Born in Beirut in 1949, Nahas makes paintings that seem to breathe, bloom and multiply, their surfaces dense with coral-like textures and saturated colour. Drawn to the intricate geometries of the natural world – fractal forms, tidal rhythms, marine organisms – he builds sculptural compositions that hover between abstraction and life. Palm trees, cedars, and starfish recur like memories, rooted in the landscapes of his childhood in Beirut and Cairo. What emerges is a practice attuned to pattern and persistence, a visual language shaped by place, time, and a quiet, unrelenting awe.
Nahas earned a BFA from the Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, in 1971 and an MFA from Yale University in 1973. In 2013, Nahas was awarded the National Order of the Cedar for services to Lebanese culture, an honour rarely bestowed to visual artists. Nahas has showcased his work extensively on an international scale for the past three decades, his first major museum retrospective held at the Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut, in 2010. His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Mathaf, Doha; and the British Museum, London.
The Lebanese Pavilion will be located in the Arsenale, at the heart of the Biennale’s historic grounds.
We extend our warmest congratulations to Nabil on this well-deserved honour.
Ben and Rosamond Brown at Ben’s house in Notting Hill, London. Photo: Jack Orton
