"Art is a process of self-liberation, of liberation from tangible things or ideas. The cubists sought the liberation of form. The impressionsit sought the liberation color." - Hanibal Srouji
Hanibal Srouji is a Lebanese artist born in Beirut in 1957 and raised in Saïda. In 1976, during the Lebanese Civil War, he left Lebanon with his family and settled in Canada. This early experience of displacement, together with his later returns to Lebanon, became central to the development of a practice shaped by memory, exile, destruction, movement, and repair.
Srouji studied painting at Concordia University in Montréal, earning a BFA in 1982 and an MFA in 1987. He also completed a D.N.S.E.P. in Fine Arts at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nîmes, France, in 1987. Since 1989, he has lived and worked between Paris and Beirut.
His work is rooted in abstraction, but it remains closely connected to lived history and material experience. Srouji is known for working with untreated canvas, acrylic, fire, water, rust, acid, and layered surfaces. Fire is one of his most recognisable tools: he burns, punctures, stains, and scars the surface of the canvas, creating marks that evoke damaged walls, movement, rupture, and the physical traces of violence. At the same time, his use of colour, rhythm, and open space gives the work a sense of renewal rather than closure.
Across series such as Particules, Transformations, Touches, Offrandes, Tête dans les Nuages, and Let Us Dream, Srouji has developed a visual language that moves between destruction and reconstruction. His paintings do not represent conflict directly; instead, they register its aftermath through surface, gesture, burn marks, and light. The canvas becomes a space where memory is not simply recalled but materially worked through.
Srouji has exhibited widely in Lebanon and internationally, including in France, Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Japan, Kuwait, Singapore, and the UAE. Alongside his studio practice, he has maintained a long teaching career in Canada, France, the United States, and Lebanon. He joined the Lebanese American University in Beirut in 2010 and later served as Chair of its Department of Art & Design.
His work is held in public and private collections internationally, including collections in Lebanon, France, Canada, Switzerland, Singapore, Morocco, the United States, and the UAE.