Beginning his artistic training at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Art in 1953, Lebanese artist Halim Jurdak went on to receive his Master’s Degree in Fine Arts from “Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts” in Paris where he received the first prize in the Engraving category at the school’s prestigious annual exhibition. Participated in many notable international and regional exhibitions, he began teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts of the Lebanese University in Beirut in 1966.
Jurdak’s style has evolved greatly over his long career, from academic realism to cubism, from figurative abstraction, to non-figurative abstraction, in which he focused on forms, patterns, colour and composition. His most recent works have centered on the elemental qualities of the human figure.
Describing his unique practice the artist articulated: “There is no more a palette from which the colors are carried to the pictorial surface, because the pictorial surface itself has become the palette. The visual concept, or reality, does not go from my head to the pictorial surface, but is generated through the meeting of the two midway.”
Jurdak has written numerous artistic and literary articles and has written several books on art theory, including The Metamorphosis of Line and Colour in 1975 (dealing with the psychological reasons underlying modern and contemporary fine art movements) and The Eye of Contentment, published in 1995.
His work is held in many private and public collections such as the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts” - UNESCO Palace, Beirut; King Khaled collection, Riyadh; Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, Beirut; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris and AUB, Beirut.