Ali Mourabet

Born in Damascus in 1951, Ali Mourabet has lived in Beirut with his family for the greater part of his life. An architect since 1976, he has a long-running passion for designing buildings, and as a professional artist since 1977, a love for depicting scenes from Lebanon, and this is reflected in much of his work. In addition to painting and architecture, Mourabet also worked as a caricaturist for a daily newspaper and two weekly magazines in Abu Dhabi from 1978 to 1980 and images of his paintings have been used on promotional material by the United Nations Unicef organization and the Lion’s Club for fundraising events. The consistent theme running through Ali Mourabet’s captivating paintings is their extremely vibrant color palette. With many of his works presenting simplistic geometric shapes and architectural forms and others depicting everyday life in his immediate surroundings, Mourabet is continuously seeking to explore different styles and techniques, while at the same time remaining faithful to the subjects closest to his heart. His use of saturated colours, especially in his sun-drenched faces of buildings and inviting beach scenes, gives an endearing feeling of positivity. Mourabet often paints everyday locations from the city as he observes and depicts the buildings that surround his high-rise studio and immediate surrounding environment. In more recent paintings, he has begun to combine his love for geometric forms with more descriptive elements, creating distinctive landscapes and cityscapes that sit somewhere between the abstract and the figurative.