Aref El-rayess Biography
Aref El Rayess was born in Aley, Lebanon, in 1928.
He started painting when he was eleven. His first exhibition was organized in 1948. Then, from 1948 to 1957 he traveled between Senegal and Paris, where he studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts and at the free studios of Fernand Léger or André Lhôte. In 1957 he returned to Lebanon and opened an Aubusson tapestry atelier with Canadian Roger Caron. In 1959, thanks to an exhibition at the Italian Cultural Center, he was offered a scholarship to study in Italy, where he spent four productive years between Florence and Rome. In 1963 the Lebanese government commissioned two sculptures to represent Lebanon at the New York World's Fair and El Rayess spent two years in the USA meeting expressionist painters and intellectuals.
In 1967, he returned to Lebanon and became a founding member of the Department of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University. From then on, he participated in conferences and exhibitions on politics and art in the Arab world. In 1975, he produced a series of drawings depicting the Lebanese civil war, published as a book entitled “The Road to Peace” and participated in the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine in 1978. Around that time, he began working in Saudi Arabia, where he produced around 13 sculptures between Jeddah, Tabuk and Riyadh.
He returned to Aley, Lebanon, in 1992, where he lived until his passing in 2005.
