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Halim Jurdak (1927)
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Born in 1927 in Ain El Sindianeh, North Lebanon, Halim Jurdak
began his artistic training at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Art
in 1953. He is the first Lebanese artist to work in the medium
of etching and engraving on an equal footing with painting and
drawing. His work has won many prizes, including the first prize
for Engraving at the Annual Exhibition of the École Nationale
Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. He has participated in
numerous international and regional exhibitions and began
teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese
University in Beirut in 1966.
Jurdak has written numerous artistic and literary articles and
has published several books, including The Metamorphosis of Line
and Color (dealing with the psychic and mental motives
underlying contemporary and modern plastic-artistic movements),
and The Eye of Contentment (consisting of contemplations and
meditations on art).
Jurdak’s style has developed gradually from academic realism to
cubism, to figurative abstraction, to non-figurative
abstraction, and then to free non-objective forms, patterns and
compositions born from the qualities of pure abstract disengaged
colors and lines. In his later work, Jurdak focuses on the human
figure, capturing its warmth, elasticity, harmonies and
cadences, believing it the probity of the artist.
Describing his method of work, Jurdak said: “There is no more a
palette from which the colors are carried to the pictorial
surface, because the pictorial surface itself has become the
palette. The visual concept, or reality, does not go from my
head to the pictorial surface, but is generated through the
meeting of the two midway.”
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