Omar Bilbeisi studied art at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1993. In 1995, he took the position of Assistant Director at Darat al-Funun in Amman. Bilbeisi participated in the Jordanian Pavilion at the EXPO 2000 in Hanover, Germany. He also helped set up the Dar El Fan Museum and the Museum of Traditional Life in Amman. He held his first solo exhibition at Orient Gallery in (1998) and his second, entitled "Harf," at Zara Gallery (2004) in Amman. He has participated in several group exhibitions in Jordan, England and Germany. He lives and works in Amman.

"The paintings of Omar Bilbeisi reflect his complex rapport with the rudimentary forms that embody language - the alphabet. Calligraphy in his works seems to emancipate itself from rules pertaining to the clarity of words, sentences and even meaning.

They force the viewer to construct a personal significance of what is seen through their focus on a sinuous and continuous movement of line, colour and space. The compositions and styles of representation in his exhibition are multi-fold. While some tend to reach a purist state, others take on an expressive character, which at times pushes the work within the margins of pop culture and kitsch.

This complex method of representation is further heightened by an infiltration of the ‘ready made' to his canvases (i.e. leopard skin), which-if anything-emphasizes his resistance to an affiliation with a particular style by belonging to all. This ambiguous position has a double edge, which empowers the work on both critical and aesthetic levels. On one hand, it claims that originality does not necessarily dwell in inventing a personal language of expression. . . . On the other hand his works point to the singularity of the subject matter regardless of the multiple visual manifestations of that stylistic palette.

Looking at Omar Bilbeisi's works, one tends to appreciate how ‘beauty' is often concealed yet depicted through noise, ambiguity and contradictory layers of meaning."

Sahel al-Hiyari

Architect and painter