Şahmaran

A winner of the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Marwan Sahamrani spends half the year in Beirut and the other half in the small Mediterranean mountain village of Tarbena, Spain, which his work reflects. His textured paintings have abstract, expressionist tendencies but are rooted in the early traditions of landscape painting. He draws heavy inspiration from Picasso’s Guernica, a painting that is particularly close to his heart; Sahmarani sees it as representing an analogous situation to the violence he has witnessed throughout his life in Lebanon. “My work is another way of seeing the reality of the region,” he says.