Aziz Art Sep 2019

Aziz Art

Sep 2019

Edward Hopper

Nadim Karam

1-Edward Hopper 20-Nadim Karam

Director: Aziz Anzabi Editor : Nafiseh Yaghoubi Translator : Asra Yaghoubi Research: Zohreh Nazari Iranian art department: Mohadese Yaghoubi

http://www.aziz-anzabi.com

Edward Hopper July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967 was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is best known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.

Early life Hopper was born in 1882 in Upper Nyack, New York, a yachtbuilding center on the Hudson River north of New York City.He was one of two children of a comfortably well-to-do family. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Elizabeth Griffiths Smith and Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant.Although not so successful as his forebears, Garrett provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife's inheritance. He retired at age forty-nine.Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. They were raised in a strict Baptist home.His father had a mild nature,

and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid.

His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. It is now operated as the Edward Hopper House Art Center.It serves as a nonprofit community cultural center featuring exhibitions, workshops, lectures, performances, and special events.

Hopper was a good student in grade school and showed talent in drawing at age five. He readily absorbed his father's intellectual tendencies and love of French and Russian cultures. He also demonstrated his mother's artistic heritage. Hopper's parents encouraged his art and kept him amply supplied with materials, instructional magazines, and illustrated books. By his teens, he was working in pen-and-ink, charcoal, watercolor, and oil— drawing from nature as well as making political cartoons. In 1895, he created his first signed oil painting, Rowboat in Rocky Cove. It shows his early interest in nautical subjects 1

In his early self-portraits, Hopper painting.Early on, Hopper modeled tended to represent himself as his style after Chase and French skinny, ungraceful, and homely.

Impressionist masters Édouard Though a tall and quiet teenager, Manet and Edgar Degas.Sketching his prankish sense of humor found from live models proved a outlet in his art, sometimes in challenge and a shock for the depictions of immigrants or of conservatively raised Hopper. women dominating men in comic Another of his teachers, artist situations. Later in life, he mostly Robert Henri, taught life class. depicted women as the figures in Henri encouraged his students to his paintings.In high school, he use their art to "make a stir in the dreamed of being a naval architect, world". He also advised his but after graduation he declared students, "It isn't the subject that his intention to follow an art counts but what you feel about it" career. Hopper's parents insisted and "Forget about art and paint that he study commercial art to pictures of what interests you in have a reliable means of income. life."In this manner, Henri In developing his self-image and influenced Hopper, as well as future individualistic philosophy of life, artists George Bellows and Hopper was influenced by the Rockwell Kent. He encouraged writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. them to imbue a modern spirit in He later said, "I admire him their work. Some artists in Henri's greatly...I read him over and over circle, including John Sloan, became again." members of "The Eight", also Hopper began art studies with a known as the Ashcan School of correspondence course in 1899.

American Art.Hopper's first existing Soon he transferred to the New oil painting to hint at his use of York School of Art and Design, the interiors as a theme was Solitary forerunner of Parsons The New Figure in a Theater (c.1904).During School for Design. There he studied his student years, he also painted for six years, with teachers dozens of nudes, still life studies, including William Merritt Chase, landscapes, and portraits, including who instructed him in oil his self-portraits.

In 1905, Hopper landed a parttime job with an advertising agency, where he created cover designs for trademagazines.

Hopper came to detest illustration.

He was bound to it by economic necessity until the mid-1920s.

He temporarily escaped by making three trips to Europe, each centered in Paris, ostensibly to study the art scene there. In fact, however, he studied alone and seemed mostly unaffected by the new currents in art. Later he said that he "didn't remember having heard of Picasso at all."He was highly impressed by Rembrandt, particularly his Night Watch, which he said was "the most wonderful thing of his I have seen; it's past belief in its reality."

Hopper began painting urban and architectural scenes in a dark palette. Then he shifted to the lighter palette of the Impressionists before returning to the darker palette with which he was comfortable. Hopper later said, "I got over that and later things done in Paris were more the kind of things I do now."Hopper spent much of his time drawing street and cafĂŠ scenes, and going

to the theater and opera. Unlike many of his contemporaries who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, Hopper was attracted to realist art. Later, he admitted to no European influences other than French engraver Charles MĂŠryon, whose moody Paris scenes Hopper imitated.

Years of struggle After returning from his last European trip, Hopper rented a studio in New York City, where he struggled to define his own style.

Reluctantly, he returned to illustration to support himself.

Being a freelancer, Hopper was forced to solicit for projects, and had to knock on the doors of magazine and agency offices to find business.His painting languished: "it's hard for me to decide what I want to paint. I go for months without finding it sometimes. It comes slowly."His fellow illustrator Walter Tittle described Hopper's depressed emotional state in sharper terms, seeing his friend "suffering...from long periods of unconquerable inertia, sitting for days at a time before his easel in helpless unhappiness, unable to raise a hand to break the spell."

In 1912, Hopper traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, to seek some inspiration and made his first outdoor paintings in America.He painted Squam Light, the first of many lighthouse paintings to come.

In 1913, at the Armory Show, Hopper earned $250 when he sold his first painting, Sailing (1911), which he had painted over an earlier self-portrait.

Hopper was thirty-one, and although he hoped his first sale would lead to others in short order, his career would not catch on for many more years.He continued to participate in group exhibitions at smaller venues, such as the MacDowell Club of New York.Shortly after his father's death that same year, Hopper moved to the 3 Washington Square North apartment in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan, where he would live for the rest of his life.

The following year he received a commission to create some movie posters and handle publicity for a movie company.Although he did not like the illustration work, Hopper was a lifelong devotee of

the cinema and the theatre, both of which he treated as subjects for his paintings. Each form influenced his compositional methods.

At an impasse over his oil paintings, in 1915 Hopper turned to etching.

By 1923 he had produced most of his approximately 70 works in this medium, many of urban scenes of both Paris and New York.He also produced some posters for the war effort, as well as continuing with occasional commercial projects.When he could, Hopper did some outdoor watercolors on visits to New England, especially at the art colonies at Ogunquit, and Monhegan Island.

During the early 1920s his etchings began to receive public recognition.

They expressed some of his later themes, as in Night on the El Train (couples in silence), Evening Wind (solitary female), and The Catboat (simple nautical scene).

Two notable oil paintings of this time were New York Interior (1921) and New York Restaurant (1922).He also painted two of his many "window" paintings to come: Girl at Sewing Machine and Moonlight Interior

both of which show a figure liberal, while he was tall, secretive, (clothed or nude) near a window shy, quiet, introspective, and of an apartment viewed as gazing conservative.They married a year out or from the point of view from later. She remarked: "Sometimes the outside looking in. talking to Eddie is just like dropping Although these were frustrating a stone in a well, except that it years, Hopper gained some doesn't thump when it hits recognition. In 1918, Hopper was bottom."She subordinated her awarded the U.S. Shipping Board career to his and shared his Prize for his war poster, "Smash the reclusive life style. The rest of their Hun." He participated in three lives revolved around their spare exhibitions: in 1917 with the walk-up apartment in the city and Society of Independent Artists, in their summers in South Truro on January 1920 (a one-man Cape Cod. She managed his career exhibition at the Whitney Studio and his interviews, was his primary Club, which was the precursor to model, and was his life companion. the Whitney Museum), and in 1922 (again with the Whitney With Nivison's help, six of Hopper's Studio Club). In 1923, Hopper Gloucester watercolors were received two awards for his admitted to an exhibit at the etchings: the Logan Prize from the Brooklyn Museum in 1923. One of Chicago Society of Etchers, and the them, The Mansard Roof, was W. A. Bryan Prize. purchased by the museum for its Marriage and breakthrough permanent collection for the sum By 1923, Hopper's slow climb of $100. The critics generally raved finally produced a breakthrough. about his work; one stated, "What He re-encountered Josephine vitality, force and directness!

Nivison, an artist and former Observe what can be done with the student of Robert Henri, during a homeliest subject."Hopper sold all summer painting trip in his watercolors at a one-man show Gloucester, Massachusetts. They the following year and finally were opposites: she was short, decided to put illustration behind open, gregarious, sociable, and him.

The artist had demonstrated his ability to transfer his attraction to Parisian architecture to American urban and rural architecture.

According to Boston Museum of Fine Arts curator Carol Troyen, "Hopper really liked the way these houses, with their turrets and towers and porches and mansard roofs and ornament cast wonderful shadows. He always said that his favorite thing was painting sunlight on the side of a house."

Chop Suey and Railroad Sunset. The following year, art patron Stephen Clark donated House by the Railroad (1925) to the Museum of Modern Art, the first oil painting that it acquired for its collection.Hopper painted his last self-portrait in oil around 1930.

Although Josephine posed for many of his paintings, she sat for only one formal oil portrait by her husband, Jo Painting (1936).

Hopper fared better than many other artists during the Great Depression. His stature took a At forty-one, Hopper received sharp rise in 1931 when major further recognition for his work. museums, including the Whitney He continued to harbor bitterness Museum of American Art and the about his career, later turning Metropolitan Museum of Art, paid down appearances and thousands of dollars for his works. awards.With his financial stability He sold 30 paintings that year, secured by steady sales, Hopper including 13 watercolors.The would live a simple, stable life and following year he participated in continue creating art in his the first Whitney Annual, and he personal style for four more continued to exhibit in every decades. annual at the museum for the rest of his life.In 1933, the Museum of His Two on the Aisle (1927) sold Modern Art gave Hopper his first for a personal record $1,500, large-scale retrospective. enabling Hopper to purchase an In 1930, the Hoppers rented a automobile, which he used to cottage in South Truro, on Cape make field trips to remote areas of Cod. New England. In 1929, he produced

They returned every summer for the rest of their lives, building a summer house there in 1934.

From there, they would take driving trips into other areas when Hopper needed to search for fresh material to paint. In the summers of 1937 and 1938, the couple spent extended sojourns on Wagon Wheels Farm in South Royalton, Vermont, where Hopper painted a series of watercolors along the White River.

however, he suffered a period of relative inactivity. He admitted: "I wish I could paint more. I get sick of reading and going to the movies."During the next two decades, his health faltered, and he had several prostate surgeries and other medical problems.But, in the 1950s and early 1960s, he created several more major works, including First Row Orchestra (1951); as well as Morning Sun and Hotel by a Railroad, both in 1952; and Intermission in 1963.

These scenes are atypical among Hopper's mature works, as most are "pure" landscapes, devoid of architecture or human figures.

First Branch of the White River (1938), now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is the most well-known of Hopper's Vermont landscapes.

Death Hopper died in his studio near Washington Square in New York City on May 15, 1967. He was buried two days later in the family's grave at Oak Hill Cemetery in Nyack, New York, his place of birth.

His wife died ten months later.

His wife bequeathed their joint collection of more than three thousand works to the Whitney Museum of American Art.Other significant paintings by Hopper are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Des Moines Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Hopper was very productive through the 1930s and early 1940s, producing among many important works New York Movie (1939), Girlie Show (1941), Nighthawks (1942), Hotel Lobby (1943), and Morning in a City (1944). During the late 1940s,

Personality and vision Always reluctant to discuss himself and his art, Hopper simply said, "The whole answer is there on the canvas."Hopper was stoic and fatalistic—a quiet introverted man with a gentle sense of humor and a frank manner. Hopper was someone drawn to an emblematic, anti-narrative symbolism, who "painted short isolated moments of configuration, saturated with suggestion".His silent spaces and uneasy encounters "touch us where we are most vulnerable ",and have "a suggestion of melancholy, that melancholy being enacted".His sense of color revealed him as a pure painter as he "turned the Puritan into the purist, in his quiet canvasses where blemishes and blessings balance".According to critic Lloyd Goodrich, he was "an eminently native painter, who more than any other was getting more of the quality of America into his canvases".

Conservative in politics and social matters (Hopper asserted for example that "artists' lives

close to them"),he accepted things as they were and displayed a lack of idealism. Cultured and sophisticated, he was well-read, and many of his paintings show figures reading.He was generally good company and unperturbed by silences, though sometimes taciturn, grumpy, or detached. He was always serious about his art and the art of others, and when asked would return frank opinions.

Hopper's most systematic declaration of his philosophy as an artist was given in a handwritten note, entitled "Statement", submitted in 1953 to the journal, Reality.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination.

One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the human intellect for a private imaginative conception.

The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form and design.

The term life used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it.

Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

Though Hopper claimed that he didn't consciously embed psychological meaning in his paintings, he was deeply interested in Freud and the power of the subconscious mind.

He wrote in 1939, "So much of every art is an expression of the subconscious that it seems to me most of all the important qualities are put there unconsciously, and little of importance by the conscious intellec.

Methods Although he is best known for his oil paintings, Hopper initially achieved recognition for his watercolors and he also produced some commercially successful

etchings. Additionally, his notebooks contain high-quality pen and pencil sketches, which were never meant for public viewing.

Hopper paid particular attention to geometrical design and the careful placement of human figures in proper balance with their environment. He was a slow and methodical artist; as he wrote, "It takes a long time for an idea to strike. Then I have to think about it for a long time. I don't start painting until I have it all worked out in my mind. I'm all right when I get to the easel".He often made preparatory sketches to work out his carefully calculated compositions. He and his wife kept a detailed ledger of their works noting such items as "sad face of woman unlit", "electric light from ceiling", and "thighs cooler".

For New York Movie (1939), Hopper demonstrates his thorough preparation with more than 53 sketches of the theater interior and the figure of the pensive usherette.

The effective use of light and shadow to create mood also is central to Hopper's methods.

Bright sunlight (as an emblem of insight or revelation), and the shadows it casts, also play symbolically powerful roles in Hopper paintings such as Early Sunday Morning (1930), Summertime (1943), Seven A.M. (1948), and Sun in an Empty Room (1963). His use of light and shadow effects have been compared to the cinematography of film noir.

Although a realist painter, Hopper's "soft" realism simplified shapes and details. He used saturated color to heighten contrast and create mood.

achieved his mature style, his art remained consistent and selfcontained, in spite of the numerous art trends that came and went during his long career.

Hopper's seascapes fall into three main groups: pure landscapes of rocks, sea, and beach grass; lighthouses and farmhouses; and sailboats. Sometimes he combined these elements. Most of these paintings depict strong light and fair weather; he showed little interest in snow or rain scenes, or in seasonal color changes. He painted the majority of the pure seascapes in the period between 1916 and 1919 on Monhegan Island.Hopper's The Long Leg Subjects and themes (1935) is a nearly all-blue sailing Hopper derived his subject matter picture with the simplest of from two primary sources: one, the elements, while his Ground Swell common features of American life (1939) is more complex and depicts (gas stations, motels, restaurants, a group of youngsters out for a sail, theaters, railroads, and street a theme reminiscent of Winslow scenes) and its inhabitants; and Homer's iconic Breezing Up (1876). two, seascapes and rural landscapes. Regarding his style, Urban architecture and cityscapes Hopper defined himself as "an also were major subjects for amalgam of many races" and not a Hopper. He was fascinated with the member of any school, particularly American urban scene, the "Ashcan School".Once Hopper

"our native architecture with its hideous beauty, its fantastic roofs, pseudo-gothic, French Mansard, Colonial, mongrel or what not, with eye-searing color or delicate harmonies of faded paint, shouldering one another along interminable streets that taper off into swamps or dump heaps."

In 1925, he produced House by the Railroad. This classic work depicts an isolated Victorian wood mansion, partly obscured by the raised embankment of a railroad.

It marked Hopper's artistic maturity. Lloyd Goodrich praised the work as "one of the most poignant and desolating pieces of realism."The work is the first of a series of stark rural and urban scenes that uses sharp lines and large shapes, played upon by unusual lighting to capture the lonely mood of his subjects.

Although critics and viewers interpret meaning and mood in these cityscapes, Hopper insisted "I was more interested in the sunlight on the buildings and on the figures than any symbolism. " As if to prove the point, his late painting Sun in an Empty Room (1963) is a pure study of sunlight.

Most of Hopper's figure paintings focus on the subtle interaction of human beings with their environment—carried out with solo figures, couples, or groups. His primary emotional themes are solitude, loneliness, regret, boredom, and resignation. He expresses the emotions in various environments, including the office, in public places, in apartments, on the road, or on vacation. As if he were creating stills for a movie or tableaux in a play, Hopper positioned his characters as if they were captured just before or just after the climax of a scene.

Hopper's solitary figures are mostly women—dressed, semi-clad, and nude—often reading or looking out a window, or in the workplace. In the early 1920s, Hopper painted his first such images Girl at Sewing Machine (1921), New York Interior (another woman sewing) (1921), and Moonlight Interior (a nude getting into bed) (1923). Automat (1927) and Hotel Room (1931), however, are more representative of his mature style, emphasizing the solitude more overtly.

As Hopper scholar, Gail Levin, wrote of Hotel Room: The spare vertical and diagonal bands of color and sharp electric shadows create a concise and intense drama in the night...Combining poignant subject matter with such a powerful formal arrangement, Hopper's composition is pure enough to approach an almost abstract sensibility, yet layered with a poetic meaning for the observer.

Hopper's Room in New York (1932) and Cape Cod Evening (1939) are prime examples of his "couple" paintings. In the first, a young couple appear alienated and uncommunicative—he reading the newspaper while she idles by the piano. The viewer takes on the role of a voyeur, as if looking with a telescope through the window of the apartment to spy on the couple's lack of intimacy. In the latter painting, an older couple with little to say to each other, are playing with their dog, whose own attention is drawn away from his masters.Hopper takes the couple theme to a more ambitious level with Excursion into Philosophy

(1959). A middle-aged man sits dejectedly on the edge of a bed. Beside him lies an open book and a partially clad woman. A shaft of light illuminates the floor in front of him. Jo Hopper noted in their log book, "he open book is Plato, reread too late".

Levin interprets the painting: Plato's philosopher, in search of the real and the true, must turn away from this transitory realm and contemplate the eternal Forms and Ideas. The pensive man in Hopper's painting is positioned between the lure of the earthly domain, figured by the woman, and the call of the higher spiritual domain, represented by the ethereal lightfall. The pain of thinking about this choice and its consequences, after reading Plato all night, is evident. He is paralysed by the fervent inner labour of the melancholic.

In Office at Night (1940), another "couple" painting, Hopper creates a psychological puzzle. The painting shows a man focusing on his work papers, while nearby his attractive female secretary pulls a file.

Several studies for the painting show how Hopper experimented with the positioning of the two figures, perhaps to heighten the eroticism and the tension. Hopper presents the viewer with the possibilities that the man is either truly uninterested in the woman's appeal or that he is working hard to ignore her. Another interesting aspect of the painting is how Hopper employs three light sources,from a desk lamp, through a window and indirect light from above. Hopper went on to make several "office" pictures, but no others with a sensual undercurrent.

The best-known of Hopper's paintings, Nighthawks (1942), is one of his paintings of groups. It shows customers sitting at the counter of an all-night diner.

The shapes and diagonals are carefully constructed. The viewpoint is cinematic—from the sidewalk, as if the viewer were approaching the restaurant. The diner's harsh electric light sets it apart from the dark night outside, enhancing the mood and subtle emotion.As in many Hopper paintings, the interaction is

minimal. The restaurant depicted was inspired by one in Greenwich Village. Both Hopper and his wife posed for the figures, and Jo Hopper gave the painting its title.

The inspiration for the picture may have come from Ernest Hemingway's short story "The Killers", which Hopper greatly admired, or from the more philosophical "A Clean, WellLighted Place".

In keeping with the title of his painting, Hopper later said, Nighthawks has more to do with the possibility of predators in the night than with loneliness.

His second most recognizable painting after Nighthawks is another urban painting, Early Sunday Morning (originally called Seventh Avenue Shops), which shows an empty street scene in sharp side light, with a fire hydrant and a barber pole as stand-ins for human figures. Originally Hopper intended to put figures in the upstairs windows but left them empty to heighten the feeling of desolation.

Hopper's rural New England scenes, such as Gas (1940), are no less meaningful. Gas represents "a different, equally clean, well-lighted refuge...open for those in need as they navigate the night, traveling their own miles to go before they sleep. " The work presents a fusion of several Hopper themes: the solitary figure, the melancholy of dusk, and the lonely road.

Hopper approaches Surrealism with Rooms by the Sea (1951), where an open door gives a view of the ocean, without an apparent ladder or steps and no indication of a beach.

accompaniment of the musicians in the pit.

Girlie Show was inspired by Hopper's visit to a burlesque show a few days earlier. Hopper's wife, as usual, posed for him for the painting, and noted in her diary, "Ed beginning a new canvas—a burlesque queen doing a strip tease—and I posing without a stitch on in front of the stove—nothing but high heels in a lottery dance pose."

Hopper's portraits and selfportraits were relatively few after his student years.Hopper did produce a commissioned "portrait" of a house, The MacArthurs' Home (1939), where he faithfully details the Victorian architecture of the After his student years, Hopper's home of actress Helen Hayes. She nudes were all women. Unlike reported later, "I guess I never met past artists who painted the a more misanthropic, grumpy female nude to glorify the female individual in my life." Hopper form and to highlight female grumbled throughout the project eroticism, Hopper's nudes are and never again accepted a solitary women who are commission.Hopper also painted psychologically exposed.One Portrait of Orleans (1950), a audacious exception is Girlie Show "portrait" of the Cape Cod town (1941), where a red-headed strip- from its main street. tease queen strides confidently across a stage to the

Though very interested in the meaning can be added to a painting American Civil War and Mathew by its title, but the titles of Brady's battlefield photographs, Hopper's paintings were sometimes Hopper made only two historical chosen by others, or were selected paintings. Both depicted soldiers on by Hopper and his wife in a way their way to Gettysburg.Also rare that makes it unclear whether they among his themes are paintings have any real connection with the showing action. The best example artist's meaning. For example, of an action painting is Bridle Path Hopper once told an interviewer (1939), but Hopper's struggle with that he was "fond of Early Sunday the proper anatomy of the horses Morning... but it wasn't necessarily may have discouraged him from Sunday. That word was tacked on similar attempts. later by someone else."

Hopper's final oil painting, Two Comedians (1966), painted one year before his death, focuses on his love of the theater. Two French pantomime actors, one male and one female, both dressed in bright white costumes, take their bow in front of a darkened stage. Jo Hopper confirmed that her husband intended the figures to suggest their taking their life's last bows together as husband and wife.

The tendency to read thematic or narrative content into Hopper's paintings, that Hopper had not intended, extended even to his wife. When Jo Hopper commented on the figure in Cape Cod Morning "It's a woman looking out to see if the weather's good enough to hang out her wash," Hopper retorted, "Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window."Another example of the same phenomenon is recorded in a Hopper's paintings have often 1948 article in Time: been seen by others as having a Hopper's Summer Evening, a young narrative or thematic content that couple talking in the harsh light of a the artist may not have intended. cottage porch Much

is inescapably romantic, but Hopper was hurt by one critic's suggestion that it would do for an illustration in "any woman's magazine." Hopper had the painting in the back of his head "for 20 years and I never thought of putting the figures in until I actually started last summer.

Why any art director would tear the picture apart. The figures were not what interested me; it was the light streaming down, and the night all around."

Nadim Karam born 1957is a multidisciplinary Lebanese artist, painter, sculptor and architect who fuses his artistic output of sculpture, painting, drawing with his background in architecture to create large-scale urban art projects in different cities of the world. He uses his vocabulary of forms in urban settings to narrate stories and evoke collective memory with a very particular whimsical, often absurdist approach; seeking to 'create moments of dreams' in different cities of the world.

Tokyo while completing master and doctorate degrees in architecture.

Teaching Nadim Karam taught at the Shibaura Institute of Technology in Tokyo in 1992 with Riichi Miyake and then returned to Beirut to create his experimental group, Atelier Hapsitus. The name, derived from the combination of Hap (happenings) and Situs (situations), comes from Karam's enjoyment of the fact that the encounter of these two factors often gives rise to the unexpected. He taught architectural design at the American University of Beirut Early life and education (1993-5, 2003–4), and was Dean of Nadim Karam grew up in Beirut. the Faculty of Architecture, Art and He received a Bachelor of Design at Notre Dame University in Architecture from the American Lebanon from 2000–2003. He coUniversity of Beirut in 1982, at the chaired in 2002 the UN/New York height of the Lebanese civil University conference in London for war,and left the same year to the reconstruction of Kabul and study in Japan on a Monbusho was selected as the curator for scholarship. At the University of Lebanon by the first Rotterdam Tokyo he developed an interest in Biennale.From 2006–7 he served Japanese philosophy of space, on the Moutamarat Design Board which he studied under Hiroshi for Dubai and regularly gives Hara, and was also taught by lectures at universities and Fumihiko Maki and Tadao Ando. conferences worldwide.

He created several solo art 20 performances and exhibitions in

Urban art projects With Atelier Hapsitus, the pluridisciplinary company he founded in Beirut, he created large-scale urban art projects in different cities including Beirut, Prague, London, Tokyo, Nara and Melbourne. His project for Prague's Manes Bridge in the spring of 1997 was both a commemoration of the city's postcommunist liberalization and an echo of its history, with the placement of his works in parallel to the baroque sculptures on the Charles Bridge. The post-civil war 1997–2000 itinerant urban art project he created for central Beirut was one of five worldwide selected by the Van Alen Institute in New York in 2002 to highlight the role they played in the rejuvenation of city life and morale after a disaster. In Japan, 'The Three flowers of Jitchu' realized at Tōdai-ji Temple in Nara in 2004, was a temporary installation commemorating the achievements of a Middle Eastern monk, Jitchu, whose performance is still enacted yearly since the year 752 in the temple he designed for it. Karam's project

took 20 years to gain acceptance from the Tōdai-ji Temple authorities. His 2006 Victoria State commission'The Travellers' a permanent art installation of ten sculptures which travel across Melbourne's Sandridge Bridge three times daily, tells the story of Australian immigrants and creates an urban clock in the city.

Selected public art installations 2017 Trio Elephants- Lovers’ Park, Yerevan, Armenia 2017 Wheels of Innovation- Nissan Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan 2016 Stretching Thoughts: Shepherd and Thinker- UWC Atlantic College, Wales, UK 2014 Wishing Flower- Zaha Hadid's D’Leedon residential project, Leedon Heights, Singapor Architectural work Nadim Karam is mainly known for his conceptual work, like 'Hilarious Beirut', the 1993 post-war antiestablishment project for the reconstruction of Beirut city centre, and 'The Cloud"a huge public garden resembling a raincloud that stands at 250m above ground..

Inspired by the city of Dubai, it proposes a visual and social alternative to the exclusivity of the skyscrapers in Gulf cities.

Karam's signature un-built projects include the 'Net Bridge' a pedestrian bridge conceived as a gateway to Beirut city centre from the marina with five lanes that playfully intersect and interweave.

Similarly, his winning design of a competition for the BLC Bank headquartersfor Beirut features the new headquarters straddling the old.

Karam collaborates closely with Arup Engineers in London, who give structural and technical reality to his most unusual ideas.

Ongoing projects The Dialogue of the Hills is an urban art project conceived to invigorate the historic core of Amman through a series of public gardens and sculpture for each hill community. The sculptures are designed to create a dialogue with the others on the surrounding hills of the city, physically and visually linking diverse socio-economic communities. The Wheels of Chicago is a project inspired by the city where the Ferris wheel was invented. An iconic project for the city shoreline, through several wheels, symbolizes the different city communities and harnesses sea breezes to provide energy for the surrounding parklands

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