1924 - 1982

Biography and Statement:

Farid Aouad was born at Al Maydan in the south of Lebanon in 1924. He studied at ALBA (Lebanese Fine Arts Academy) from 1943 until 1947. He then went to Paris where he spent one year at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and, from 1948 until 1951, he worked in the studios of Othon Friesz and André Lhote.

Aouad returned to Lebanon where he remained for seven years, but in 1959 he settled permanently in Paris. The last years of his life were spent in poverty and ill-health.

He has held numerous exhibitions both in Lebanon and abroad. He exhibited at Galerie Cazeneuve and in the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (1963, 1964). He also held an exhibition in Sulzbach-Murr in Germany (1969) and at Galleria La Barcaccia, Rome (1972).
Since the end of the 1960's he has followed the experimental school and there acquired that ardor in seeking a logical response to the problem of the relation between man as a plastic enigma and the cosmos as an infrastructure of a violence which reveals the secret of this enigma.

The art of Farid Aouad may thus be considered from a dual point of view: as a conscious attempt to exploit the durable techniques of the various experimental schools that were master of the field at the beginning of the Seventies, and yet it is equally the product of the stubborn quest by this artist who has now acquired the right to go beyond his provincialism in order to resolutely tackle the path of artistic research on an international level.

However, with Farid Aouad the quest for adventure is not carried out at the expense of his work but rather at that of the idea we might give ourselves of his future production. From this point of view, he may become one of those rare witnesses of artistic boldness in a generation of Lebanese artists that is nevertheless very rich.

In 1982, the year of his death, Aouad was paid a special tribute by the Sursock Museum, along with other artists who had died since 1975.