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Exhibitions

And if we found our way back to Beirut's art galleries?

In this promising month of January, the Lebanese art scene is coming back to life. Gallery owners seek to offer their visitors some color amid the grey of recent months. Here's a look at some of their proposals.

And if we found our way back to Beirut's art galleries?

A collage artwork using wallpaper by Haibat Balaa Bawab exhibited at the Art on 56th gallery. Courtesy of the Art on 56th gallery.

The happy life in Haibat Balaa Bawab's collages

A collage artwork using wallpaper by Haibat Balaa Bawab exhibited at the Art on 56th gallery. Courtesy of the Art on 56th gallery.

She named her exhibition at Art on 56th "Timeless Traditions"* (Traditions intemporelles), and for good reason. In this new batch of works, Haibat Balaa Bawab has focused on depicting a certain Lebanese way of life. Namely the tradition of invitations, social gatherings, family reunions.

Walking through the display of her paintings, it's like moving from a sunlit garden where amiable gatherings evolve to rustic tables and festive atmospheres in lush greenery. Her characters, with nearly featureless faces and active silhouettes, seem to replay, in a contemporary version, the Déjeuners sur l’herbe and other rural works of the Impressionists.

Except that this septuagenarian artist's uniqueness lies in her patchwork of motifs, painted and glued on the canvas. She makes various kinds of paper herself, playing with the outcome of their colors and textures, and in this series, created between late 2023 and late 2024, she manages to diffuse the joyful and carefree breath of a happy Lebanese life in which she mentally took refuge during this very dark year. A breath of cheerfulness that she brilliantly communicates to her exhibition visitors.

*At Art on 56th; Gemmayzeh, Youssef Hayek Street, until Feb. 8.

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The double lives of Ghassan Abu Sittah

Something bittersweet at the Tanit gallery

A sculpture by Pistoletto stands in the center of the Tanit Gallery in Beirut. Photo Z.Z.

Having experienced the full range of bittersweet emotions in Lebanon over the past few months, gallery owner Naila Kettaneh-Kunigk conceived her first exhibition of the year around these tones. Titled "Bittersweet Symphony,"* it brings together a selection of works from about twenty artists she has collaborated with in her Beirut space.

Loyal followers of the Tanit gallery might find it to be a déjà-vu experience, encountering pieces by artists familiar to the space, such as Zena Assi, Abed al-Kadiri, Moje Assefjah, Ghassan Zard, Nadim Karam or Élie-Philippe Schehade, among others... But they can also, like new visitors, rediscover works from older and rarer exhibitions.

Viewers will be swept away by the sometimes quirky, other times more engaged discourse emanating from some of the exhibited pieces. Like this sculpture by the renowned Michelangelo Pistoletto, a key figure of Arte Povera, reminiscent of a compressed bed base incorporating rabbit cages and at the same time a giant metal bow tie, or a magnificent charcoal drawing full of suggested violence by Syrian prison escapee artist Youssef Abdelke.

Not to mention the palm trunk paintings by Nabil Nahas, works imbued with poetry by Ricardo Brey, one of the pioneers of New Cuban Art, or those with biting anti-consumerist irony by American "postpop" artist David Kramer. Sweet and bitter, to be savored according to one's tastes.

*At the Tanit gallery in Beirut, Mar Mikhael, until Feb. 20.

The color that blooms from dark days by Daisy Abi Jaber

Cacti and Cities by Daisy Abi Jaber. Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery

It had been several years since Daisy Abi Jaber last presented her works in a gallery. She's back at Mark Hachem in Beirut with a batch of 27 acrylics and mixed media on canvases in which her fans will find some of the symbols that have become her signature. Namely: hearts, birds, tulips, and other flowers that add a youthful and poetic note to her highly graphic compositions with complex details and masses of colors surrounded by a sinuous black line representing her inner world, oscillating between anxieties and reveries.

For this artist with an emotional brush, there is always something hidden, something to discover behind the image we capture of beings and things. Hence the title of her exhibition "Behind the Image."*

The compositions of her paintings arose from pieces of colored glass collected from the Aug. 4 Beirut Port explosion. In a spontaneous gesture, the artist begins by assembling them, surrounding them with twisted lead, to create small stained glass sculptures with free and poetic forms. Sort of haikus of motifs that she transcribes on canvas, in a sensitive interaction between shapes, colors, and feelings. Her way of capturing the moment that upsets, moves, or surprises.

*At the Mark Hachem gallery, Beirut, until Jan. 30.

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Mazen Rifai, the lover of colors

An acrylic on canvas signed by Mazen Rifaï (50 x 50 cm; 2023). Courtesy of the Agial Gallery.

We know his landscapes of plains with bright colors, his variations around the vast expanses of the Bekaa, an inexhaustible source of inspiration for this artist and architect, son of Baalbeck. In his new batch of acrylics on canvas titled "Amorous Colors"* (Couleurs amoureuses), Mazen Rifai continues to explore "the secret and magic that transform memory landscape into abstract landscape," as he says.

However, in this recent work, the sixty-year-old painter has ventured into new playgrounds of forms and contrasting tones. Light and dark, soft and hard. They are still endowed with the particular light of Lebanon. There is new life breathed into this series of landscapes that have been reinvented into new and unexpected spaces. Spaces that sometimes seem in motion and at other times take on, at a glance, a feminine curve.

"These bodies of women in which there are all the seasons of trees," whispers the poetically inspired artist. On the walls of the Agial gallery in Hamra, hangs alongside this new series of paintings, of various dimensions, tapestries reprising older compositions, more in the modernist landscape tradition from which Rifai hails.

An exhibition that offers visitors a dive into a bath of colors, where everything is nuances and harmonies... a benefit to us all.

*At the Agial gallery, Abdel-Aziz street, Beirut, until Feb. 22.

The happy life in Haibat Balaa Bawab's collagesShe named her exhibition at Art on 56th "Timeless Traditions"* (Traditions intemporelles), and for good reason. In this new batch of works, Haibat Balaa Bawab has focused on depicting a certain Lebanese way of life. Namely the tradition of invitations, social gatherings, family reunions.Walking through the display of her paintings,...