Zareh began to draw at a very young age. Born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1956, he moved with his family to Lebanon in 1963. During the Lebanese Civil War of the 1970s, Zareh studied fine art at Beirut's Al Kaslik University. The atrocities of the war, followed by the breakdown of tolerance and civility between quarreling communities, had a profound effect on the sensitive young artist. What he witnessed in those years would start to define the core concerns and attributes of his art, expressed at turns through sorrow, apprehension, and explosive outrage at manifestations of social and political injustice. After moving to the United States in 1983, Zareh dedicated himself to drawing, painting, and performance pieces, with much of his output designed to raise public awareness of universal issues such as environmental degradation, globalism and its dire consequences for disenfranchised societies, and human-rights violations including genocide.
