Chaouki Chamoun

Chaouki Chamoun was born on January 19, 1942, in Sariine, in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. He enrolled at the Fine Arts Institute of the Lebanese University in Beirut in 1968, where he earned a Diploma of Higher Studies in Painting in 1972. On a scholarship, he moved to the United States, earning a Master of Fine Arts in painting, with a minor in sculpture and ceramics, from Syracuse University in 1975. He then spent the years 1975 to 1979 as a doctoral fellow in the Department of Art and Art Education at New York University, concentrating on aesthetics and studio art, and several biographies describe him as completing that doctorate in 1979.

He returned to Lebanon and built a long teaching career, holding faculty positions at the Lebanese American University, the Lebanese University, Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, and the American University of Beirut, stepping back from LAU's studio art faculty around 2015. Alongside teaching, he has served as president of the Lebanese Artists Association for Painters and Sculptors and as a founding member and consultant to the Lebanese Artists Syndicate. He continues to live in Lebanon and paints actively; a solo exhibition, Desert Dreams, at Khawla Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates, and continued gallery activity into 2026, point to an ongoing practice.

Chamoun is generally discussed as a senior figure of Lebanese painting whose academic training in Beirut, Syracuse, and New York set him apart from many peers, and whose landscape and horizon based imagery, visible in exhibition titles such as Horizon and New Horizons, has anchored a decades long practice. Writing on the occasion of the New Horizons retrospective marking fifty years of his career at L'Art Pur Foundation in Riyadh, the researcher and critic Dr. Maha Sultan called him an artist who "aptly bears the characteristics of an educated artist, distinguished by skill, creativity, innovation, and constant passion." The throughline in this criticism is an artist whose formal rigor and appetite for reinvention across landscape, horizon, and city imagery are treated as central to his standing.

Chamoun's clearest auction milestone is Toppled City, a painting responding to the September 11 attacks, which sold at Christie's Dubai in November 2007. Several sources, including the Dalloul Art Foundation, describe the sale as having set the record price at the time for a work by a living Lebanese artist, though the exact hammer price and currency are not stated in the sources reviewed for this profile. Around the same period, biographical material about him cites an Artprice ranking among the top newly auctioned artists worldwide, though sources vary between a top 25 and a top 50 placement. He is represented by Mark Hachem Gallery, with solo exhibitions in its Beirut and Paris spaces, and his work has also shown at galleries including Khawla Art Gallery in the United Arab Emirates. His work is held by the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut.

Chamoun's market sits well below the scale of internationally benchmarked contemporary names, and public auction data on him is sparse: the 2007 Christie's Dubai sale of Toppled City is the clearest documented milestone, but even that result's exact price is not publicly recorded in the sources reviewed here. There is no published catalogue raisonne; a monograph, The Art and Life of Chaouki Chamoun (Saqi Books), documents his career but does not function as one, so provenance and verification through Mark Hachem Gallery or the artist's studio matter more than usual. Collectors should also expect regional, rather than global, comparables, since most of his exhibition and sale history runs through Beirut, the Gulf, and a small number of American and European venues.