Salah Missi is a Lebanese visual artist whose practice spans drawing, painting, printmaking, and installation. Born in Saida, South Lebanon, in 1992, he lives and works in Beirut. He holds a BA and MA in Architecture from Beirut Arab University and a BA in Fine Arts from the Lebanese University, completed in 2022. In the same year, he joined a year-long residency at Beirut Printmaking Studio, where he developed his engagement with traditional printmaking techniques, including aquatint and etching.
Missi’s practice is shaped by architecture, material process, and the political realities of Lebanon and the wider Arab region. His work examines place, social fragmentation, inherited systems of power, and the recurring violence that structures everyday life. Through drawing, printmaking, and painting, he develops a visual language grounded in the human figure, landscape, and symbolic form.
Black holds a central place in Missi’s recent work. He uses ivory black, a pigment historically made through the burning of animal bones, as both material and conceptual ground. For Missi, the pigment carries death within its composition, connecting the image to absence, loss, and the erosion of goodness within contemporary social and political conditions.
Across his recent body of work, Missi turns to the cypress tree as a recurring symbol. His interest began through observing cypress trees planted in cemeteries across different religious communities. He traces the tree’s layered associations across ancient Mesopotamian, Zoroastrian, Greek, Roman, Christian, Islamic, and regional visual traditions, moving from life and immortality toward mourning, death, and eternal sorrow. Missi reactivates this symbolism in relation to fire, explosions, and the columns of smoke that mark contemporary war.
In Ephemeral Lands, Missi reflects on the fragmentary experience of a nation through images of collective burial, isolation, and shared vulnerability. The series explores communal existence in a country shaped by instability, political failure, and repeated collapse. His later project Landscapes of Duality extends this inquiry through the relationship between the cedar and the cypress, life and mourning, national identity and mortality.
Missi’s work is guided by a clear visual language that remains accessible while sustaining historical, political, and symbolic depth. His practice invites viewers to confront realities that often feel too familiar to see clearly: war, social division, exhaustion, grief, and the difficulty of imagining distance from crisis.
Through a practice rooted in drawing, printmaking, and material symbolism, Salah Missi positions art as a form of witnessing and historical re-reading. His work gives shape to the conditions of living in a place marked by recurring violence, where mythology, memory, landscape, and the human body become ways of understanding the present.