Artist
Abbas Makki
Abbas Makki is a Lebanese visual artist and university professor whose paintings bring expressionism and abstraction together through the human figure, symbol, and color. His work explores memory, anxiety, and social reality.
Human figures appear in shifting compositions charged with tension and emotion, while warm colors, overlapping forms, geometric elements, and expressive lines draw on Lebanese culture and memory.
Makki teaches art, drawing, and visual communication at the Lebanese University’s Faculty of Fine Arts and Architecture. He heads the Department of Advertising and Graphic Arts and Visual Communication at Branch I. Across his practice, he builds a dialogue between people, place, and memory, turning everyday experience into images that hold both expression and ambiguity.
Roumine lives in my memory and in my everyday life, just as I live in it. Its houses rest in my imagination, as its walls and narrow old passageways embrace me. Roumine has changed since I first came to it as a child at the beginning of the civil war. We grew up together. I left for many years, but I kept returning, and it never left me.
Its mornings have a scent, and so do its evenings. Its summers hold memories, and so do its winters. Its spring is wild; its autumn is tender. I remember the faces of its people, those who died and those who remain, one by one. I remember its trees, too. Roumine is my imagined garden. I return to it whenever boredom closes in on me.
