Gebran Tarazi

Gebran Tarazi was born in Damascus in 1944 into a family of artisans, antique dealers and decorators, and died in 2010. He spent his early years in Morocco, studying at the École des Frères de Lassalle in Rabat, and moved to Lebanon with his family in 1959. His paintings are mostly square panels of wood or card in acrylic, enamel, alkyd and metallic paint.

He took a degree in economic law at Saint Joseph University in 1967 and worked as an antiquarian while writing; his novel Le Pressoir à olives was published by L'Harmattan in 1996. After the family business closed in 1986 he moved to the mountains and began research into geometric abstraction, painting from 1988. His numbered series work through the variations of the Qayem-Nayem, a traditional arrangement of four rectangles in a square, in colour and pattern.

Tarazi held his first solo exhibition at Galerie L'Amateur d'Art, Beirut, in 1993. A posthumous exhibition was held at Villa Audi, Beirut, in 2011, and the books Geometric Variations (2007) and Twelve Seasons (2017) document his method. Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha acquired a group of his works in 2015. A wooden work by him was shown in Our Identity and Symbols at the Nabu Museum, El Heri, in 2025.