Mona Nahleh

Mona Nahleh is a Lebanese painter, born in Beirut in 1963, who lives and works in the city. She paints the human figure in acrylic on canvas, on formats up to two metres square, moving between figurative and almost abstract treatment, and has also made sculpture in papier-mâché.

Nahleh studied English literature at the Lebanese University and is self-taught as a painter. For a year she learned the fundamentals of painting technique from the Egyptian painter Mansour Ahmed, and at the end of that apprenticeship, in 1994, she held her first solo exhibition at Al Shamoa Gallery in Cairo. Her paintings are dedicated to the human figure and follow the states of mind of her characters; her monograph, Between Form and Formlessness, was published in 2011.

In 2024 Maya Art Space in Beirut showed her solo exhibition Parallel Realities, with paintings including Uncertainly (2022), Cognitive Dissonance (2023) and Staying In The Light (2023). She took part in the Biros International Art Symposium in Sharm El-Sheikh in 2018.