Biography of the artist

Born in Beirut. 1945
Works and Lives in USA


Farid Haddad, artist and educator, earned a BA in Fine Arts from the American University of Beirut and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In 1972 he received a Fulbright-Hays grant to explore the practices of lithography and embossing in New York City. In the mid-eighties he was the recipient of two Individual Artist Grants from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts. In the late sixties Haddad was known primarily for his constructivist style and began exhibiting black-and-white ink drawings characterized by their linear compositions, geometric shapes, patterns and gradations. Following this period, Haddad produced works based on both experimental and spontaneous approaches to drawing and painting that were exhibited in Beirut at Contact Art Gallery in 1972. After which, for about three years, he intensely focused on Color Field works by exploiting the expressive use of abstraction and color, and their relation to the landscape. In the late seventies and early eighties, Haddad deepened his visual language by circling back to, and exploring additional aspects of his experimental, spontaneous and gestural works with transitory qualities as a way to convey immateriality. Haddad had his first solo exhibition in 1971 at the John F. Kennedy American Center in Beirut, and since has had twenty one-person exhibitions in Beirut, Lebanon (1972, 1973, 1975, 1992); Kuwait City, Kuwait (1972); Rome, Italy (1975, 1986); New York City, New York, USA (1976, 1977, 1979, 1980); Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA (1977, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983); Paris, France (1981); and Henniker, New Hampshire, USA (1993, 2007). He has participated in more than fifty group exhibitions in Europe, the Middle East and North America.