Born in 1968 in Beirut, Habib Fadel is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting and photography. Shaped between Lebanon, Europe, and the United States, his trajectory unfolds through an ongoing dialogue between memory, displacement, and creation, informed by the cultural and cosmopolitan history of his native city.

During the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), Fadel pursued part of his education between France and Switzerland before returning to Beirut, where he graduated in Business Management from Beirut University College in 1991. Drawn early on to artistic practices, he developed a particular interest in music and devoted himself to the study of opera singing and theatre in Milan between 1993 and 1996.

In 1997, Fadel moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in audiovisual production and directing while continuing a personal artistic inquiry. In the early 2000s, painting gradually emerged as a central language within his practice. Following studies at UCLA, he developed an expressive painterly body of work that led to several exhibitions in Beirut and Paris. In 2003, he opened his studio in Beirut, marking the beginning of a sustained artistic commitment.

His early solo exhibitions reveal a universe deeply shaped by memory, the human figure, and emotional tension. War, School and Faces (Alice Mogabgab Gallery, Beirut, 2012) explores the psychological traces of war through figures marked by raw colour and incisive painterly gestures. The following year, Visages et regards (Galerie Jacques Leegenhoek, Paris, 2013) further developed this inquiry into portraiture and interiority. In 2015, his work Dad (2012) achieved his auction record at Christie’s. With Tao (Galerie Samia Mehdi, Beirut, 2019), dedicated to his son, his work shifted towards a more intimate and luminous approach to portraiture.

On 4 August 2020, the Beirut port explosion destroyed Fadel’s home and studio, marking a decisive turning point in both his personal and artistic trajectory. Forced to leave Lebanon, he relocated to Italy. Following a long recovery from Covid in 2021, during which he was temporarily unable to paint, Fadel turned to photography — a shift in practice that opened a new chapter in his work.
Since then, Fadel has developed a photographic practice grounded in analogue processes and the historical platinum-palladium printing technique. Produced from large-format negatives, his works are created through an entirely manual process, from darkroom development to contact printing. This slow and meticulous approach, which he readily compares to the painterly gesture, lends his images a singular tonal depth and material presence.

His recent projects include À la recherche de mes racines, a series devoted to the landscapes and memory of the Ligurian territory, presented at Cella Gallery in 2022, as well as Anime Fiorite
(2023), a body of work meditating on the fragile and transient beauty of living forms, presented at Il Salotto di Milano. He continues this inquiry today through new images devoted to nature, created using the platinum-palladium process.

Now based in Santa Margherita Ligure, Habib Fadel continues to develop a body of work shaped by experiences of displacement, reconstruction, and contemplation, in which nature, light, and time become the protagonists of a deeply personal inquiry.