Cardboard Untitled acrylic on paper 2004
Rafik Majzoub is a rising star in the Lebanese art scene, heading towards international recognition for his works which traverse the rich territory between the personal and the social. His paintings and larger scale conceptual pieces explore the many facets of this territory — including the arrogance of power, the wounds it inflicts, the despair it creates, and even the possibilities it sometimes offers.
His most recent works deal with the Iraq conflict as refracted through the daily news media and individual emotions such as confusion, hurt, and sarcastic anger. Other pieces investigate the general state of humanity as accessed through personal unease. Viewers might also find in these works clues about how the current situation in Lebanon has been experienced on a level richer than the nightly news suggests. Majzoub was born in 1971 to Lebanese parents and grew up in Jordan. He moved to Beirut in the early 1990s, where he began learning art from painters currently active in the country. His most recent exhibition was at Beirut’s Galerie Janine Rubeiz in February 2005.
