Mohammad El Rawas was raised in Beirut, where he studied painting at the Lebanese University, and moved to London in the early eighties to study Printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art. Upon graduating, he came back to Lebanon where he still resides. He recently retired from teaching at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut.

During the Lebanese civil war, El Rawas set out to denounce man’s brutality and selfishness, in works where he decomposed the pictorial surface by erasing the brush’s trace and combining painting with photographs of the war. Since the late eighties, he has been experimenting with the possibility of adding a third dimension to his art. He started creating glass boxes, where figurines, found and hand-made objects coexist in surrealist painted settings, broken by lines of metal or wood. Laden with art historical and pop culture references, El Rawas’s works spur a reflection on the fragmentation of identity in contemporary society.

Since 1979, El Rawas has often exhibited in solo in Beirut, London, and Dubai. He was featured in more than forty collective exhibitions and numerous international art fairs and biennales throughout Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East. El Rawas was notably awarded the Prize of the Biennale at the 24^th Alexandria Biennale of the Mediterranean Countries in Egypt in 2007. His works are part of many public collections, including the British Museum in London. In 2004, Saqi books published a retrospective of his oeuvre, The Art of Rawas.