Untitled, 1981

Amine El Bacha was a pioneering Lebanese painter whose work helped shape the trajectory of modern art in Lebanon. Born in Beirut in 1932, he studied at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) before continuing his education in Paris at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he trained under Maurice Brianchon and Henri Goetz.

In 1960, El Bacha returned to Lebanon and founded the Amine El Bacha Studio, where he taught painting and drawing, mentoring a generation of young artists. He was also a founding member of the Beirut Group, an influential collective active in the 1960s and 1970s that sought to define a distinctly Lebanese modernist identity.

El Bacha’s art is distinguished by its bold use of color, rhythmic compositions, and geometric forms, often infused with references to music, literature, and memory. His approach treated color as an expressive language in itself, balancing intuition with structure. His works capture Beirut’s rooftops, gardens, and cafés with a poetic sensibility, while also exploring abstraction as a universal visual dialogue.

Throughout his career, El Bacha exhibited widely in Lebanon, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. His paintings are included in prestigious collections such as the Sursock Museum (Beirut), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the Tate Modern (London).