Amine El Bacha Biography
Amine El Bacha was born in 1932 in Ras Al Nabaa, Beirut. From an early age, he visited the studio of the Hungarian painter Stefan Lokos and the two sketched their beloved Beirut together. El Bacha attended the St. Sauveur School before beginning his artistic studies under the supervision of César Gemayel, Jean-Paul Khoury and Fernando Manetti at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts from 1954 to 1957. The artist participated in the Salon d 'Beirut Autumn in 1958 and 1959 winning first the Prize of the French Embassy and subsequently the Prize of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture. In the same year, 1959, he exhibited at the Paris Biennial and held two solo exhibitions at the Yafeth Library of the AUB and at the French Cultural Center in Beirut. In 1960 the artist's life changed as he continued his artistic training in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts and the Académie de la grande chaumière under the advice of Maurice Brianchon and Henri Goetz with the assistance of a grant study provided by the French Embassy.
The solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1964 was a significant moment in his career, echoing wider recognition within the Parisian art scene. The time spent in Paris was crucial to El Bacha's career, as he further developed his style there, engaging with modernism and drawing from his childhood memories, eventually arriving at his signature expressionist style that emerged from Cubism and oriental art. He excelled at coloring, creating balanced sets of hues struck by light. While the subjects ranged from rural landscapes, nature portraits and cityscapes to human beings and abstract drawings without figures, his astonishing ability to combine colors and create emotion through the careful selection of hues remains constant in his work. Although celebrated for his ability to colour, El Bacha's career echoes a restless sentiment: the artist worked in a range of media including painting, ceramics, tapestry and jewellery. He also worked with photographer Ghassan Kitmitto combining improvised painting onto photographic prints. His love for poetry and literature is also present in his works as El Bacha also illustrated the poetry collections of Alain Jouffroy, Nadia Tueni and Leopold Sedar Senghor. Throughout his career, El Bacha has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions including Sultan Gallery (1973, 1974, 1976, 1985), Huesca Museum of Fine Arts (1975), Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts (1980), Darat Al Funun (1995) and Sursock Museum (2017). Although the artist spent a lot of time abroad in France, Italy and Spain, he has always been connected to his motherland and has never lost an aesthetic connection with Lebanon: the country of his heart and soul. The artist dies in 2019.
