Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui
Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui (born 1945) is a Lebanese painter, writer and artist. Biography. Born in Egypt, Lebanese artist Mouna Bassili Sehnaoui attended the American University of Beirut and the University of Arizona, where she studied Fine Arts. Sehnaoui works in a variety of formats ranging from painting, writing, design and sculpture. She has had solo exhibitions in Paris, Dubai, and Beirut. Sehnaoui currently lives and works in Beirut with husband Marwan, President of the Lebanese Order of Malta and sons Salim Sehnaoui and Khalil Sehnaoui. In the seventies, Bassili Sehnaoui was in charge of the Graphic Art  Department of the Lebanese National Council of Tourism. She also produced designs for stamps, packaging, posters, and book illustrations and created films for the Lebanese public television station. She later learned painting and typography, two disciplines she taught in Lebanese universities. Her style is influenced by a Middle Eastern cultural heritage as reflected in the flat treatment of colours in both Byzantine icons and Persian miniatures. The treatment of space is very personal and brings a new dimension to a figurative approach by the use of hieroglyphic –like symbols and “windows” that open to reveal an added aspect of the  subject treated. Since the early 1990s, she has produced albums of lithographs based on Phoenician legends and studied porcelain painting, while still working as a designer and illustrator. Bassili Sehnaoui has been exhibiting art since the mid-sixties. Her seemingly naïve paintings most often reference her own surroundings, her country and its cultural heritage. The works suggest a very personal interpretation of space where shapes and line interpenetrate in colourful harmonies. Work. Her work has won several Prizes and figures in the Museum of Prints, Alexandria; the Sursock Museum, Beirut; the Art Collection of the American University of Beirut; the  Bank Audi Art Collection as well as many private collections around the world. Sehnaoui also designed the famous Lebanon logo, now widely used, for the Ministry of Culture in the 1960s, as well as several posters encouraging tourism in the country. She is also known for her paintings depicting the Lebanese civil war.