Serge Séroff

(Last updated: July 2022)

Serge Séroff was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1963.

Serge Séroff is the great-grandson of the celebrated painter Valentin Serov (1865–1910), the greatest portraitist of his time in Russia, whose works hang in the major Russian museums.

Serge Séroff grew up in Beirut, where he attended the Grand Lycée de Beyrouth. From 1975 to 1977, because of the war in Lebanon, he lived in Paris with his mother and two brothers to continue his schooling. It was the first trauma of war he would experience as an uprooted person. He returned to Beirut in 1977, only to leave again in 1978, as the fighting intensified, for the Lycée français de La Marsa in Tunisia. He came back to Beirut in 1979 and completed his schooling at the Grand Lycée de Beyrouth.
In 1981, after passing his baccalauréat, he began studying architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, graduating in 1988.

Diploma in hand, he embarked on a career as an architect, working for practices in France and Lebanon, as well as designing furniture on his own account.
In 1995, he obtained a diploma in cultural management from the ISMC in Paris.
In Lebanon, he organised exhibitions of contemporary artists (Artists’ Kites – Centre Dunes, Beirut; the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – Espace SD, Beirut).
Back in France in 2000, after several years in Beirut, he devoted himself to promoting Mediterranean artists online and organised exhibitions (Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Grand Théâtre de Saumur, Mairie de Castelnaudary, Actuel-Art – Paris).
Always drawn to the visual arts, he has at the same time devoted himself to drawing and painting – which he took up during his architecture studies – while never missing the exhibitions that interest him in Paris and elsewhere.

Serge Séroff is also a writer. His texts have appeared in L’Orient-Le Jour (Beirut), Nahar ech Chabab (Beirut), Al-Ahram Hebdo (Egypt), Calypsolog (France), Le Monde (Paris), Passerelles (France), Déco Magazine (Beirut), the Revue du Conseil National du Tourisme (Lebanon), 111101.net (Lebanon), babelmed.net (France) and artemed.net (France).
His subjects include his personal memories, art, architecture, design, urban planning, the environment, geography, landscape, living environments, society, culture and politics. He has also written prefaces for artists’ catalogues.