Gebran Tarazi was, one can say, an artisan turned artist turned artisan. He never abandoned his artisanal work, it continued to inform his work. He was deeply committed to bringing his oriental heritage into modernity. His is an approach not dissimilar to the Bauhaus’, or the earlier Die Brücke’s– their craft did not belong to the crafts movement. Tarazi both visually and rhetorically attempted to identify artisanal craft, its materials and motifs, with an oriental modernity. As both a writer of literature and as a visual artist, the tension between image and text was central. His career trajectory is worth noting: he was someone who theorized his work after he had done it. Among his later work are studies which resemblesketches, but which were produced after the completion of each of his works. They were to logically prove the number of variations that each work could generate. He was profoundly reflective of his own practice while producing.
