Self-taught Lebanese painter Flavia Codsi worked in an interior design office before starting to paint the ruins of her native city, Beirut, towards the end of the Lebanese civil war. Between 1994 and 1996, she won three consecutive prizes from the Sursock Museum’s Salon d’Automne; this encouraged her to exhibit more often, in art fairs and galleries.

Codsi paints still lives of fruit displayed in cases reminiscent of jewellers’ displays, with vibrant colours and precious stones-like finish. However, her main focus remains the representation of the human figure. Always painting from a live model, she reveals the character and the secret emotions of her subjects in almost hyper-real oil paintings, drawing attention to the subtleties of human facial and body expressions, ranging from sheer insanity to complete bliss.

Since the late nineties, Codsi has exhibited in solo in Lebanon and participated in numerous collective exhibitions, in Beirut, Sharjah, Dubai, Sydney and London, where she was notably featured in Lebanon, the Artists’ View II, in 2004. She was awarded the first prize of the Lebanese Diaspora International Art Exhibition in Beirut in 2010. Her works have been featured in many auctions, including Christie’s Dubai auction in 2009. Codsi has also illustrated children’s books and created site-specific works such as trompe-l’oeil and mural projects in collaboration with her brother, the painter Fulvio Codsi, on Beirut houses and restaurants.