Shanoor is an American neo-symbolic expresionist, fine artist, designer, creative director, photographer, CEO, Owner of Devarj Design Agency, Inc. and speaker who has been making art for five decades.
His artistic career began at the tender age of 16 in Beirut, Lebanon, where he lived until 1975 when, because of the Lebanese civil war, he migrated to the United States.
As a precocious sixteen-year-old, his work was exhibited in the Armenian Genocide Exhibition in Beirut. That year, his paintings were also accepted at the German Cultural Association for International Children’s exhibitions.
His work was later featured in the Children’s Museum of Armenia (1966), and in a group show at the Musée Sursok (1967). In 1969, Shanoor assisted in sculpting the official portrait bust of The Honorable Sami (Bay) Solh,
the Prime Minister of Lebanon, and in 1974, marking an important final achievement in Beirut just before moving to the US, Shanoor participated in a milestone group show at Galerie Contemporaine with Middle Eastern artists Rafic Charaf, Fateh Al Mudarress, and Juliana Séraphim.
He was educated in advertising design with a BFA at London’s Barking College and following Shanoor’s move to Chicago in 1975 he was educated at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He began a career in art direction, branding, and design for advertising agencies such as Leo Burnett, BBDO before eventually opening his own design firm in 1984. Alongside his fruitful career in design, Shanoor continued to develop his personal artistic practice.
Shanoor began experimenting with painting on a range of new materials, including large un-stretched canvases, shower curtains, and found paper, and held shows at various alternative and traditional art spaces and world wide tours including Spain, Greece, Berlin, Venice, Switzerland, NY, Miami, Amsterdam, Chicago, Boston, LA, SC, NC, IN and Missouri.
In life, we may seem surrounded, but we are ultimately alone. Art on the canvas becomes our universal language, a way to communicate with everyone, transcending that isolation.
When Shanoor arrived in Chicago at the age of 26, he brought with him a passion for visual storytelling, honed through his studies in filmmaking at the Art Institute of Chicago. His training in advertising design in London had already paved the way for a promising career in the commercial world, earning him a position as an art director at the prestigious Leo Burnett ad agency. Yet, despite the allure of the commercial world, Shanoor never abandoned the one constant in his life—painting. This practice has been part of him since he was six years old.
Born into a family that has known the pain of displacement, Shanoor’s work is infused with an urgency to express and disrupt. This sense of dislocation drives him to reinvent his world on the canvas, challenging the viewer to confront the unfamiliar. Shanoor calls his style Neo Symbolic Expressionism—a reflection of the extreme conditions of our time. Rooted in a surrealistic mindset, his art shocks and captivates, pulling the viewer into a world where the familiar is made strange. In this world, eyes multiply, lips stretch beyond the ordinary, and hands mold like clay, taking on forms that defy expectation.
With simple backgrounds juxtaposed against these extraordinary subjects, Shanoor’s work echoes the provocations of the surrealists, nodding to the transformative power of Picasso. His art pushes real objects into the realm of the hyper-real, crafting a new reality on the canvas.
The tragedies that have marked his life are not just influences but forces that shape and reshape the characters that emerge in his work. In a world where free expressionism reigns, Shanoor thrives, channeling the displacement of his parents from their homeland into the creation of an entirely new reality.
This sense of displacement has driven Shanoor to forge his own world—a world populated by characters that exist on the edge of the real and the unreal. Through his art, he has not only established his identity but has also reinvented reality itself, building a new world on his terms.