Mouna Rebeiz

Mouna Rebeiz
Born	1957 (age 67–68) Lebanon
Education	Beaux-Arts de Paris, Fine Arts School Beirut
Known for	Painting, Site-specific installation

Biography

Mouna Rebeiz is a Lebanese-Canadian painter born in Beirut in 1957 and based in London. She grew up surrounded by musicians, painters and poets, who influenced her painting. Fascinated by the multiple facets of the human being and the human psyche, she studied psychology at the Sorbonne and at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. She travelled extensively, and then in 1995 met Alix de la Source, a lecturer at the Louvre specializing in 18th-century painting., who taught her about the techniques of the great masters. She perfected her mastery of patinas in the Renaissance courses, and studied with Abraham Pincas, a painter and teacher at ENSBA Paris, and with Mohamed El Rawas, a Lebanese painter and engraver teaching at the fine arts school in Beirut.

Technique and vision

Rebeiz's work mixes the traditional techniques of 'Old Masters' with contemporary issues and exploration of the human being and its psyche. It is said that her works incorporate both male and female and the West and the East.^[1] Steeped in influences from both Lebanon and France, Rebeiz's work explores how both cultures emphasize the duality in the role of women.

In her works, both figurative and abstract, Mouna Rebeiz captures the energy of life itself, and the life of woman, expressed at its simplest, as a universal crucible of emotions. Her great sculptures, like revisited totems, are set to the rhythms of present time in the playfulness of space.

Work as seen by the press

"There’s very little formatting in Mouna Rebeiz’s work and even less conciseness. Instead, there’s ardour and energy. She’s a tornado that cannot be labelled or put into a category or dictated to by fashion. With twenty-five years in the art world to her credit, she is familiar with too many of its secrets to want to blend into it.

Nurtured on poetry and music, Rebeiz has chosen the company of vivid or soft colours – mystical blue, passionate red, golden yellow – bordering on abstraction. Quivering with impressions of both harmony or discordance and sizzling with memories, her painting is an extension of her personal introspection. Rather than depicting the rage rampant in the world, the conflagrations and rifts tearing apart the Near East where she was born, she conveys the passions of the soul together with bodily sensations.

The interpretation of her works remains open, each spectator being able to project his or her own hopes and torments. While so many artists swear only by innovation, she blurs the lines, never hesitating to dialogue with the great masters of the past. Yet if she embraces traditional techniques, it is solely to employ them on deliberately provocative subjects. With unparallelled faith and freedom"

Works

Ode to Life (2006)

Ode to life is a vibrant homage to woman’s power of seduction. Life is feminine, as is the act of creation. Man only exists in contrast to Woman. The Child is an expression that she sets free and modulates; it is in her simplest expression that she takes the lead and fulfils her destiny. The nude paintings seek to liberate Woman. They are an ode to her body, crucible of the emotions of both sexes.

The Betty Boop collection (2012)

The Betty Boop Collection is all about confronting reality and virtuality. It opposes the classical approach, which renders the original beauty of the female body, and the modern angle that markets an “airbrushed” version as the ultimate object of desire. Retouched, reconfigured, the body’s natural beauty has become almost alien to our eyes. It is urgent to reacquaint ourselves with the body as it is, with its flaws, imperfections, shapes... All that makes it truly beautiful. With a nod to this doll-like cartoon character–a feminine icon, but removed from reality, Rebeizwished to lift the veil of appearances to shine a light on the reality of femininity.

The Tarbouche (2015)

In 2015, Rebeiz rose to acclaim when she organized an exhibition and auction at the Saatchi Gallery in London called "Le Tarbouche." The exhibition was based on Rebeiz's ongoing work of taking the Fez, a traditional Middle-Eastern symbol of male virility, and reconstructing it into various commentary on the female form.^[1]

For the exhibition, Rebeiz invited several artists and designers to reinvent their own versions of the Fez, with the pieces to be held for auction after the close of the exhibition. The auction was held at Sotheby's with proceeds from the auction and the sales of Rebeiz's paintings provided to the charity "Innocence in Danger," a movement for the protection of children against sexual abuse.^[2] Participating designers included Sandra Choi of Jimmy Choo, Elie Saab, Lanvin, Twiggy, Giles Deacon, Helen McCrory, Angel Chang, Jean-Charles de Castelbajac, Alber Elbaz, Nathalie Rykiel, Stephen Webster, Zaha Hadid, and others.

La voie de l'Opera (2017)

"I have always painted listening to music, and it is from here that the concept of transcribing music into painting came. Without doubt, I sought to break through the mystery that forms matter into spirituality. For this, I adopted the grand spirits (air) of the classical operas. Through colors, forms, foundations (backgrounds), I have attempted to fill the gap between the visible and the invisible. Between emotions, senses and pure creation, my “Operas” invite to contemplation; a unique approach which is quasi metaphysical"

The Trash-Ic (2018)

How do they cohabit? It's not exactly new. Hieronymous Bosch and Goya, Balthus, and Picasso’s erotic works blazed the trail: the scandalous, the grotesque, the hardly tolerable, the violent and the beautiful coexist as one in art. Even so, here it is not about painting trash as much as it is about painting a period that is “trash”. Not provocative or scandalous for scandal’s sake, but rather an attempt to convey the movement of the times, via the movement of the paintbrush. Creating to comprehend…creating to pierce the mystery of a world in which we can feel alien, displaced. Creating to understand the intentional refusal of the aesthetically pleasing, and decadence and the obscenity raised as new norms. Creating to truthfully reflect the sad decline of the human relation. Creating to resist. To continue to be. To exist, (h)ic et nunc. Creating, that trash may also be chic. And so it is that trash and beauty generate/nourish each other, coexisting in the face of controversy and drawing their respective matrixes from a society in search of new points of reference. One no longer exists without the other. Without scandal there can be no history of art.

Les Ors du temps (2018)

The hours go by, laden with what was, near-weightless with what lies ahead. A treasure that encapsulates human existence, they possess the glow and shimmer of gold. They inherit its timeless force...that no one can challenge.

Fxxx power (2019)

The days of Jack Kerouac, pioneer of the Beat generation and the counter-culture revolution of the 1960’s are long gone, but have we truly left them in the past? While the economic, political and societal norms that bind us have loosened, they still exist as tightly worn camouflage, only superficially masked to the undiscerning eye. Fxx power is a reminder that we remain on the frontlines fighting for tolerance and acceptance, for the actualization of equality, for the end to corruption and war.

Color Power (2021)

What would the world be without color? How would we perceive reality without red, blue or green? Can we imagine living in black and white? Color is what gives life its intensity, its depth, but also thepossibility of joy. It is light, a vital momentum, energy. In an attempt at total renunciation, in the exile of solitude and a silent retreat, Mouna Rebeiz endeavored to grasp what the purest, most authentic and “truest” in color is.

"Can painting be considered a form of metaphysics that attempts to solve the enigma of color? Merleau-Ponty aptly suggests, in Eyeand Mind, a certain vision of the world: “Painting celebrates noother enigma than that of visibility.” Mouna recreates this same vision in this attempt to penetratethe enigma of color, which is also that of visibility. But Mouna Rebeiz remains faithful to her own spirit, faithful to that mystery that characterizes her creative momentum, as shown by these twelve canvases in which we plunge ourselves: “We use colors but we paint with feeling” (Jean Chardin)" Elsa Godart - Philosopher and psychoanalyst

The Soothsayer (2022)

The Soothsayer Video presentation- Venice Biennial 2022

The Soothsayer refers to the character of Shakespeare’s tragedy who warned the emperor Julius Caesar of his premeditated assassination in the Senate, but who was ignored and called a “dreamer.” I use the idea of premonition as being one of the artist’s missions. I take an interest in the unlikely meeting point between artificial intelligence and the mystic. Three works dialogue with each other and guide the viewer along the path of his own discovery and that of humanity: a majestic set of the revisited 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, a puzzle of colored pieces and an abstract totemic sculpt

Les Sans visage - The Homeless series (2024)

“Les sans visages” series started in March 2020 during the confinement, when the homeless were the few still in the streets of Paris. During this period a large part of the planet found itself cloistered at home, masked, invisible. Suddenly those who have always been invisible appeared because their home is the street.

"Are there ten, twenty, fifty… or perhaps a hundred faces? Or just one? That is hiding behind what is invisible in our hyperactive, voraciously ambitious lives, devouring time like Chronos, on an insatiable quest for success and recognition? To whom do these abandoned bodies strewn on the ground belong? The paradox of our contemporary society resides in the fact that while being in a permanent search for visibility, we render most of humankind invisible. In other words, there are those who “exist” on social media, in the endless growth of popularity or starification, in search of a media-friendly existence comprised of apparent success… such as the influencers and those who “live” (and die) amid general indifference and terrible suffering, amid stooped bodies doomed to gruelling lives of hard work, harassment and exhaustion: migrants and homeless people, for example, faceless people without identity. The hypermodernity which is erected on the altar of excess (hubris), whether too much or too little, produces these two extremes, the visible and the invisible. Since we are oblivious to what is certainly the most admirable part of humankind, Mouna Rebeiz sheds light on these (often unfinished) faceless faces to remind us that the invisible is worthy of the visible; but also that the invisible is part of humanity in its entirety. These faceless faces thus avoid the individual – in La Sieste or again in Femme de Lespugue, it is not a specific person whom Rebeiz is painting but the very condition of the Invisibles – and this across time, from yesterday to tomorrow. The artist’s gesture indisputably conveys the need to recall not only that dignity is inalienable from the single fact of being human, but also the urgency there is to defend it. In that, in her Sans-Visage, Rebeiz compels us to take our responsibility of man among men and to redefine, together, what we understand by the word “humanity” Elsa Godart - Philosopher and psychoanalyst

Solo exhibitions

2022

• Totems, Leila Heller Gallery, New York, United States of America

• The Soothsayer, 59th Venice Biennale, Republic of San Marino, Chiesa St-George, Venice, Italy

• Colour Power, Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

2019

• The Lebanese Embassy with the British Lebanese Association, London, England

• The Chelsea Arts Club, London, England

2018

• The Trash-ic, Saatchi Gallery, London, England

2017

• La voie de l’opéra, Galerie Pierre Alain Challier, Paris, France

2015

• Le Tarbouche, Saatchi Gallery, London, England

2013

• The Betty Boop Collection « A-Part-Être », Galerie Hubert Konrad, Paris, France

2012

• The Betty Boop Collection « L’Être et le paraître », Galerie Pierre Alain Challier, Paris, France

2008

• Hymne à la vie, Galerie Daniel Besseiche, Paris, France

2007

• Carrousel Du Louvre, Paris, France

2006

• Hymne à la vie, La maison de l’Amerique Latine, Monaco, France

Group exhibitions

2024

• 'Deck the walls! Leila Heller gallery NY, USA

• Totems (through RMZ Foundation) Mahlaxmi racecourse, Mumbai, India

• Leave it in my dreams, Tanit Gallery, Cromwell place, London, England

2023

• Le rêve a ses raisons, The French playing card museum, Issy-les-Moulineaux, France

• Menart Fair, Palais d’Iéna, Paris, France

• Figurations, un autre art d’aujourd’hui, Maison Caillebotte, Yerres, France

2022

• A Harmony of Different Voices, DIFC Sculpture Park, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

• 59th Venice Biennale, Rebeiz presented "The Soothsayer" based on the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, reinterpreted into paintings on aluminum plates.^[3]

2020

• Togeth’Her, Monnaie de Paris, Paris, France

• Œil de Bic, Fondation Bic, Paris, France

2013

• Le Rouge et le Noir, Art 13, Meshkati Fine Art, London, England

2012

• She views herself, Fondation Paul Ricard, Paris, France

– She views herself, Banque ODDO, Paris, France

2007

• Art en Capital, Grand Palais, Paris, France

2006

• Salon des Indépendants, Grand Palais, Paris France