Nahna Maak: Lebanese Flag Series

Gifting “In Flight” to the mayor during the inaugural Lebanese Heritage Day for New York City. From Left: Michael Karsouny, Consul Majdi Ramadan of the Lebanese Consulate of New York City, and New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Artist’s Statement — About the Series

Nahna Maak reimagines the Lebanese flag as abstract painting. The elements of the flag — red bands, white ground, and cedar — are transformed into shifting fields of gesture, texture, and symbol, becoming a living emblem of endurance, unity, and rebirth. Drawing from Etel Adnan’s belief that, “Painting is a kind of poetry expressed visually,” each work becomes both poem and witness: an image of Lebanon’s struggle and beauty, but also a gesture toward collective healing.

Through gestural abstraction, Karsouny bridges modernism and conceptual contemporary art by fusing the raw immediacy of painting with the charged symbolism of national identity. Each flag is at once a formal composition and a conceptual site — rooted in modernist materiality yet open to contemporary debates on culture, memory, and diaspora. As in poetry, meaning resides not only in the artist’s hand but in the reader’s gaze: each viewer’s encounter brings new resonance, new memory, new possibility.

We are honored to see Nahna Maak housed in significant contexts, including the Lebanese Consulate, the Office of the First Lady of Lebanon, and the Mayor of New York City. Below is a selection from the series.

For collectors wishing to acquire a work, we welcome inquiries and maintain a dedicated waitlist.

Michael Karsouny presenting his Lebanese flag painting, “The Shape of Things To Come” to Nehmat Aoun, Lebanon’s First Lady, at the Lebanese Consulate in New York City.