PRIZEWINNER
LEBANON
Rached Bohsali
Eco . . . Logic 1999
watercolour 104 x 75 cm
Exhibition Catalogue No. 132

Rached Bohsali was born in 1957 in Beirut, Lebanon. He works in the Faculty of Interior Design at the Lebanese American University, having studied architecture in Beirut and Paris in the early 1980s. This large trompe l’oeil watercolour shows a single rose in a glinting silver vase. An imagined Ecology and Heritage page of the Al Nahar newspaper, dated 1 January 2000, bears the headline: ‘20% of Batroun’s Coast, A Onetime Haven, Overwhelmed by Corporate Sharks’. The artist comments: ‘Our landscape and economy has been the victim of the logic of real estate and a chaotic economy, a consequence of 17 years of civil war. The newspaper expressing the past comes behind the blooming flower, a symbol of the optimistic green future, planted in a neat shiny metal cylinder, a symbol of cleanliness’.