Biography

Rana Raouda is a prominent Lebanese painter born in Beirut in 1961. She graduated in 1983 with a Fine arts degree from  Beirut University College  now the Lebanese American University  and continued her studies in the USA at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington D.C. 1989-1992 . The Monoprint Workshop in New Mexico in 1992- 1993 as well as the Torpedo Factory in Virginia .

She has successfully showcased her work internationally at solo and group exhibitions.

In  1997 she is awarded the young artist award for the XXI Salon d’Automne at  The Sursock Museum in Beirut .  In 2007 she receives the first prize in Vision Art 2007 in Ornans-France and in Montreux-Switzerland during the MAG exhibition. Her work is displayed in public and private collections ;  St Elias Church Kantari – Beirut , An nahar bldg Beirut ,Hermes Art Collection , Dubai UAE , Dubai TV UAE…

Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Sursock Museum in Lebanon .

The Roman Art critique Marco Tonelli , wrote «  ..Rana Raouda’s painting undoubtedly turns towards a subtle and tenuous line where the artist transforms her inner vision into an autonomous, hypersensitive substance, with implications and aspirations of an obvious spirituality. She thus places herself on the historical side of abstract expressionism, which has seen extreme and oscillating attitudes between the tragic and frantic gestures of a Pollock and the inaction painting of a Rothko or a Newman, where the iconoclastic apparition opened the doors wide to mystical and sacred settings and visions …

It is probable that if the general but suggestive term of “landscape of the soul” were to find an equivalent image, as in a photograph, these last works of Raouda would be the figure which makes a pictorial counterpart to them: It is certainly painting, but at the exposure times which are long, negatives printed with moods without a body but of a pure essence.

And as long as it is possible to show the shape of sound, electromagnetic waves or atomic trajectories, why not hazard the idea that a painting like Raouda’s can be a direct manifestation (only through the culture of art) of the emotions of a personality certainly rich in passions, ideas, feelings, thoughts, memories? Which is, basically, the very absolute meaning of abstract and symbolist painting (of which that of Raouda is in a way a direct filiation, even in her personal way of revisiting them) and perhaps also of figurative and realistic painting where, behind the descriptive forms, we cannot fail to recognize the deepest identity of the artist and her emotions.

…In conclusion Raouda is still disposed to believe that one can reactivate the pure, beautiful and “untouchable” substance (this is the Latin meaning of the term “sacer”) whose noise and chaos of the contemporary world (schizophrenic debtor of ‘images) make a term incomprehensible and irrelevant.”

Rana lives and works in Beyrouth.