Raouf Rifai lives and works in Beirut, where he was born. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the Sorbonne in Paris, and teaches art at the Lebanese University.

Rifai’s visual language combines abstract symbols with references to Middle Eastern cultural heritage (such as the traditional tarbush hat), in very bright paintings where thick black lines outline blocks of colour. One of the recurrent themes in his work is that of the dervish, a kind of simple and common man evolving in virtual or real spaces. Rifai’s dervishes are as diverse and colourful as Middle-Eastern society itself, with their myriad of expressions, attitudes and emotions.

Rifai has taken part in numerous collective shows in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and Japan. He has also had more than fifteen individual exhibitions since 1984. In 2010, he was awarded the first prize of the Sursock Museum’s Salon d’Automne in Beirut.