We are delighted to announce the first solo exhibition by British painter Ivan Seal at the gallery. Always painting from his mind, never from an object or image, Seal sets to work the imagination’s triumvirate of improvisation, invention and memory producing paintings at once flat and three-dimensional, realistic and yet like nothing ever seen before.

Set up in the style of still lives on pedestals, or on an indefinite but realistic ground, represented objects often appear unfinished, conveying a sense of ‘in the making’, while single strokes of paint float free from representation, or the ‘clay’ has not ‘yet’ been completely worked out to define an object. These shapes emerge from his recollections or stories, often carrying childhood memories, like for example the porcelain figurines that populated the home of his parents, which he used as toys to represent complex plays. Such memories also continually shift in balance or tension between the worlds of his father, who was a butcher, and his mother, a ballet dancer. It’s an iconography the artist has evolved over time in which paint slips disconcertingly from tool to subject matter, becoming embodiments of psychological reckoning; a physical expression of the gunk of memory through which each of us fashion our worlds. Paint is many things in his work; but it is also just paint, laid on a canvas, as bold, dumb and brilliant as that permits.

In this exhibition Ivan Seal asked the gallerist to select paintings from the years 2012 to 2018 and then made what he calls associative reaction paintings, thus creating a dialogue and making the reflection about the possibilities of improvisation/creation/painting even more complex. Some of the older works represent ceramic figurines of the Italian Commedia dell’ Arte as well as abstracted versions of flower bouquets and rocks. The new paintings tend to be more abstracted and wild, quoting the earlier objects but morphing them into distorted and sometimes comical forms. “Thus the understanding of maker and provider, author and interpreter is toyed with creating a game in which one controls the start whilst the other states the end. A game or a play needs a stage and here the stage is set within opaque background and vague foregrounds ruptured by the presented offering of an object. Even when shifting ever so close to figurative characters the thing remains a thing. Actors and props exist as objects to mobilize into the analytical relationship between sense and nonsense. This is also apparent in how each object relates to proximity partner and the sequential properties of the selections overall narrative.”

Courtesy of  Galleria Monica De Cardenas

Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut is delighted to present “Suspension of Disbelief”, a solo exhibition by artist Ghazi Baker, featuring a selection of his most recent works.

Growing up, Baker was amazed by what he saw in films, fascinated by the ability to pursue the viewer in believing a story line, from Superman to Star Wars and even romantic films.
Later in life, this fascination turned into a philosophical pursuit, a journey of discovery and research to find what really makes the viewer accept the premise of a film.

Suspension of disbelief is an essential ingredient for any kind of storytelling. With any film, the viewer has to ignore the reality that they are viewing a staged performance and temporarily accept it as their reality in order to be entertained. Black and white films provide an obvious early example that audiences are willing to suspend disbelief, no matter how implausible the images appear, for the sake of entertainment. With the exception of totally color-blind people (achromats), no person viewing these films sees the real world without color, but some are still willing to suspend disbelief and accept the images in order to be entertained. Suspension of disbelief is also supposed to be essential for the enjoyment of many films and television shows involving complex stunts, special effects, and seemingly unrealistic plots and characterizations.

As an audience, the psychological effort required to enter this state of arrested disbelief seems innate and effortless. As an art, Baker wanted to experiment with the aesthetics of painting surreal and sometimes grotesque characters to see if the viewer would be willing to suspend disbelief and convince himself that he/she is looking at actual audience members watching a specific movie and reacting to it.

Through his exhibition ‘Suspension of Disbelief’, Ghazi Baker divides his work into two symbiotic elements, the transmitter and the receiver, the movie and the viewer and in the case of his paintings, the painted audience becomes the transmitter to the viewer of the painting, attempting to introduce the viewer as a new entity willing to possibly suspend their disbelief while looking at the paintings.

Courtesy of Mark Hachem Gallery – Beirut

The subject is absent in the works of Hyung Koo Kang, a renowned hyperrealist artist. Rather than merely depicting famous celebrities in the picture, he combines it with contemporary images like film, and reinvents the subject with exquisite craftsmanship using all kinds of possible tools with his painting, such as airbrush technique, nails, drill, q-tips, toothpicks and erasers.

In order to actualize a subject that doesn’t exist, Kang expresses the potential and possible realities in a hyperrealistic manner, rather than merely unveiling reality as it is. The figures of the past that are recreated through his hands into contemporary images pierce the viewer with a tactile gaze, exchanging that gaze with the audience, forming emotional bonds secretly.

Courtesy of Anima Gallery.

Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde is proud to present Blue, Hassan Sharif’s third solo show at the gallery, focusing on the late artist’s highly individualistic approach to colour. Spanning multiple bodies of work—paintings, Objects, Boxes, Experiments and even Semi-System-like pieces—Blue reveals how Sharif’s almost irreverent engagement with colour exemplifies his entire philosophy of art-making. A tireless experimenter who pushed the limits of his own exploration, Sharif deployed a double-barrelled strategy with colour—both subverting and elevating it. Shifting, morphing, sabotaged or framed for the viewer to ponder, colour is a “red thread” weaving across four decades of work. By considering Sharif’s practice through the specific prism of colour, Blue prompts us to re-examine the complexity of Sharif’s vision, providing a closer look at some of the impulses and contradictions that shaped it.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

Working primarily with video, printed material and sculptures, Baris Dogrusoz’s work engages the circulation, protocols and function of scenarios and historical narratives in the context of “siege culture”, including “Fortress Europe”, the US/Mexico border policy, the Israeli occupation in Palestine, reframing these as tools for critical insights and analysis.

Theater of Operations is composed of two immersive environments that envisage the archaeological site of Europos Dura in Syria as a proto-fictional place where two different operations on matter, namely aggregating and digging, can be seen as acts of creation toward two potentially resistive architectural typologies: the barricade and the tunnel.

The ancient city of Europos Dura had much in common with today’s most cosmopolitan urban landscapes. Religious, linguistic, and cultural diversity characterized much of the city’s life for more than 500 years, starting at the outset of the 3rd century B.C. and located in what is now Syria. The first archeological excavations of Europos Dura took place in the 1920s during the western military and colonial presence in the region. Funded by American oil money, the excavations were often employed as instruments of soft cultural power and left a legacy for the interpretation of archeology in the collective imaginary.

In Sand Storm and the Oblivion (2017), the artist reexamines the literal undermining of walls in a two-channel installation about the ancient multicultural fortified city by looking at satellite imagery, archeological reports from French and American archeological missions in the region, and recent events.

In the newly commissioned installation, Beneath Crowded Skies (2019), the artist establishes a triangulation between the legacy of the Europos Dura excavation, the mapping of military actions in the region during the last decade, and the presence of fighters.

Theater of Operations is Baris Dogrusoz’s first solo show in Lebanon.

Courtesy of Sursock Museum.

“The Thousand and One Nights” the first inaugural show of its kind in Beirut. Conceived and curated by Maria Brito , the exhibition is comprised of seven American contemporary artists who will make their own interpretations of the famous most important and relevant pieces of literature of the Middle- East “The Thousand and One Nights”.
The show will be held on March 15th, 2019 and running till May 3rd, 2019.

The artists we collaborated with for this group show are: Rosson Crow, Allison Zuckerman, Holly Coulis, Jamea Richmond-Edwards, Jonathan Chapline, Monica Kim Garza, and Canyon Castator

Courtesy of Artual Gallery

“I met Dinah in 2017 at her home in Paris, where she showed me different series from her work. For those few hours spent together, I could not feel time passing. I was living in a story, her story.

At first glance, her work on memory fascinated me: collages, drawings on paper, linen, and ceramics, created to record instants from her daily life. A sense of floating emerges from her writings, emanating from a hand that is at ease with both writing and calligraphy. Her inscriptions, firmly rooted in the present, incorporate traces and tempos of past journeys, demonstrating a kinship with traditional Arabic calligraphy.
Dinah left Lebanon at the age of 13 for Milan, then moved to Paris, where she graduated from high school before studying architecture. In her work, one can instantly feel the meticulous endeavor of the architect that she is. The houses, neighborhoods and gardens that she longs to keep alive in her memory carry great aesthetic and emotional value.
This exhibition bears witness to her promenades in Beirut as a teenager, and later in Los Angeles. These works have in common the geography, the cities’ layout and their chaos, the texture, the sea and the light.

In 1975, not suspecting that she and Beirut would part ways, she began writing her diary. These same pages would later emerge as “Journal 1975”: a retrospective close-up installation about her daily life in 1975 – Dinah’s final year in Beirut.
The excerpts of the pages are mainly about neighborhoods such as Zarif, Chiah, Ain el Remmaneh, Achrafieh, Saint Simon, and especially the Saint Georges, present in many of her paintings.

What fascinated Dinah as a teenager was that feeling of freedom to explore “her” city, on foot, by bicycle, or by bus…
These representations of her journeys are intertwined with strolls through the Beirut of today. They do not try to trace what is or what has been. They are a moving narrative, one that prevents memory from being confined to the lost territories of childhood.
In Los Angeles, her paintings are inspired by nature, urban geography, the light, the freedom to be and to float, which mark the city’s identity and bring her back to her perpetual strolls. To live in Los Angeles is to wander, to lose one’s inner compass, and to experience a permanent feeling of disorientation where the East is so near, yet so far away.”

– Nadine Majdalani Begdache

Courtesy of  Galerie Janine Rubeiz

Mohammad El Rawas’ (b. 1951) latest exhibition showcases a new body of work and highlights some older paintings, including two monumental works which were produced forty years apart, Train I and Train II. The former was the artist’s final-year project at the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts, from which he graduated thereafter in 1975 with honors. Having not seen this painting again until 2015, El Rawas produced Train II as a reflection on the earlier work.

The year of El Rawas’ graduation marked the beginning of the civil war in Lebanon, leading the artist to stop painting and to leave his country for Rabat, Morocco where he remained for two years, teaching art and eventually resuming painting. He returned to Beirut in 1979 to hold his first solo show, before joining the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the same year on scholarship from the Lebanese University. Upon his return to Beirut in 1981 with a Masters Degree in printmaking, he started his academic career at the Lebanese University and the American University of Beirut, which lasted for 27 years. Since 1979, El Rawas has held 11 individual exhibitions in Beirut, London and Dubai and has participated in more than 40 international art biennials and exhibitions in the UK, USA, Norway, Tunisia, Brazil, Japan, Kuwait, France, Netherlands, Egypt, UAE, Poland and China. In these international shows he won five prizes and honorable mentions including, in 2007, the award of the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries, for his first installation and vedio art piece. His work is found in many museums and public collections in Lebanon, Tunisia, Iraq, Jordan, UAE, Norway and the UK.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

This March, Meem Gallery, Dubai, in collaboration with GALLERIA CONTINUA, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Habana, is delighted to present Moataz Nasr’s debut film, The Mountain.
Last seen as part of an immersive, multi-sensory experience in the Egyptian pavilion of the 2017 Venice Biennale, the 12-minute film tells the story of Zein, a young girl who leaves her isolated village in mountainous Upper Egypt to continue her studies. On her return, Zein, now an educated, worldly youngb woman, challenges the deep-set superstitions and conventions of her village by flouting the authority of the disapproving local elders. Addressing the abiding and universal conflict between enlightened youth and the conservative establishment, Nasr uses the mountain as a metaphor for triumph over of the village ‘demon’ (fear) which lives on top of the mountain and terrorises the villagers after sunset. Taking her father’s staff, seemingly, a symbol of patriarchal authority, Zein makes her way up the mountain, cautiously followed by the villagers, and stabs it into the heart of the mountain before falling to the ground. The viewer, as well as the assembled crowd, is left wondering if she is alive or has made the ultimate sacrifice.
Despite its simple, rural setting, this fable, that demonstrates the collective, paralysing fear that breeds inaction and hinders the possibility of progress, can be applied universally. Dedicated to the artist’s three daughters, The Mountain also delivers a distinctly feminist message about the bravery of women who challenge the status quo.

For his solo exhibition and debut at the gallery, Khorfakkan-based artist, Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim presents The Space Between the Eyelid and the Eyeball, comprising three bodies of work that span his engagement with painting and sculpture. Linking each of these works is Mohamed Ahmed Ibrahim’s compulsive and intuitive sense of repetition, variation and humor.

The exhibition revolves around a large group of irregular-shaped sculptures that dominate the gallery floor space. Some resemble pylons or scaffolding, others toys, animals, trees and fruit. The brightly coloured papier-mâché sculptures are made of natural paper pigments combined by the artist, their vivid repeated lines of colour consistent with the obsessive mark-making of his practice, whilst the shapes reflect the natural formations of his domestic landscape. His choice of vibrant and at times garish colour combinations seek to capture the “explosion in his eyes” he experienced when he first saw the sunset – until that moment life between the Hajar Mountains had obstructed its view.

Black and white papier-mâché architectonic works, part painting, part sculpture, part collage line one of the gallery’s walls a seriesfirst shown at his survey at Sharjah Art Foundation in 2018. Drawing from Ibrahim’s two-dimensional Linesseries (drawings of black or white lines that are reminiscent of ancient cave markings) these peculiar pieces have a primordial quality tothem – a grouping of hand-molded oblong shapes wedged with blocks, slivers or bodies of paper hanging from strings. At times minimal,at times complex, the works play with notions of multiplicity and division.

On the other walls are groups of Sitting Man portraits, an intriguing series in different sizes and colours in which the head of the sitter is always cropped, moving the focus instead to the bodily posture and clothing. The image was originally taken froma photograph of his friend, the late artist Hassan Sharif, Ibrahim’s mentor and pioneer of conceptual art in the UAE.

Courtesy of Lawrie Shabibi

In “Freedom Fighters”, Jabre Jureidini questions the Burqa and the Hijab without the need to confine women into categories, whether their choice falls in line with hers or is drastically different from it. She investigates the Burqa as a symbolic and graphic representation of a façade. She experiments with this shield by taking a walk in these women’s shoes and questions whether religious signs have risen exponentially to fill the empty gaps in people’s confused identities. She questions whether false interpretations and prejudice against Islamic doctrines have been highly manipulated through the Burqa as a visual choice. Her artworks highlight possible repercussions of these manipulations that dominate our current political and social arena.

Her perspective stems from curiosity, not judgement, a desire, not sympathy, which allows for a more nuanced approach to this complex phenomenon. Let us save our sympathy to women who have no access to education and health care, to women who are forced to follow a certain protocol in dressing their own bodies. Pity and sympathy are not to be felt for a woman whose rationality led her to dress her body the way she pleases; fully covered or fully erotic is irrelevant.

It is time for us to realize that modernity and liberation do not follow a trajectory that is strictly confined to the amount of flesh we decide to manifest. A veracious modernity understands that liberation encompasses all choices regardless of our understanding of the reason behind those choices.
This exhibition is a reminder to all of us that the only fair label to a woman is “woman”.

Courtesy of Galerie Janine Rubeiz

Zimoun constructs extraordinary, immersive sensory experiences using lo-fi technology, such as analogue motors connected to various functional objects, including wooden sticks, cardboard boxes, and tin foil. He creates chaos from underlying systems of order, exploring elements of biology, engineering, music, sound, and installation art. These minimalist, mechanized sculptures confront the viewer/listener with a unique and compelling visual soundscape, one that simultaneously evokes the urban experience while eliciting almost physical memories of natural sounds (rain, sandstorms, or wind).

Curated by Maya Allison, Chief Curator at NYU Abu Dhabi, this landmark survey will mark the first time the artist has exhibited his work in the Gulf. The show will include a major new commission: an expansive, room-sized installation that will be unveiled on the opening night. The exhibition will also activate the Gallery’s Reading Room with multi-channel compositions from a record label project that Zimoun co-founded, Leerraum, (translated meaning ‘empty space’) which produces experimental music projects on CD, DVD, print, and sound objects, with nearly 100 works from 50 international artists and designers, illustrating once more the immersive nature of Zimoun’s work.

Courtesy of NYU Abu Dhabi

Lyons Wier Gallery is pleased to present “Courting Incoherence” by Joshua Meyer.

The human figures living within Joshua Meyer’s canvases are beautifully unresolved. Thick layers of paint work to articulate fleeting forms, flirting with realism, but ultimately approaching and confronting the limits of our knowledge.

“As I paint, I try to find my way by plunging deeply and directly into the paintings,” Meyer explains. “I revel in the paint and the chaos and I tend to get lost. The only way out is to invent and explore.”

Meyer’s constant making and remaking of the real is undergirded by his remarkable ability to implicate the viewer in the creative process. As each composition’s single, central figure dematerializes from a dense nest of brushstrokes into a pictorial space on the edge of abstraction, the audience is invited to play an active role in reconstructing the progressively open images. But at the heart of each canvas there is also a vulnerability. This gentle silence is the artist’s acknowledgement that our desire to understand those around us can never be fully consummated, that the best we can hope for are halting, humble steps towards genuine comprehension.

“Truth is fragile. I leave my paintings open and a bit unstable because they are actively grappling with the world around them,” Meyer explains, alluding to the tenuousness of knowledge and the swiftness with which our understandings about the world, others, and ourselves can dissipate. “I prefer the absurdity of painting to the absurdity of not painting,” concludes the artist.

“Looking at a Meyer painting means changing your mind about what you see,” according to novelist Allegra Goodman. “Only gradually do I discern the figures in his work. They emerge slowly, rewarding a second and third glance. Coming into their own, they transform the color all around them. As living people do, Meyer’s subjects will reveal themselves, and they will disappear. Look at them up close and they scatter, self-effacing. Back away and they gather force and gravity. Back away a little more. Give Meyer’s figures space, and they’ll possess the room.”

Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Gallery Wendi Norris is pleased to present “If stone could give”, an exhibition of new photographic works by Yamini Nayar, marking her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her West Coast solo debut.

“If stone could give” explores the fundamental intersection of sculpture and photography in Nayar’s artistic practice. Bearing strong reference to both Modernist architectural structures, informal building strategies and corporeal forms, the works invite viewers into distinctly psychological environments. Nayar’s compositions draw visually on the relationships between architecture and the body, and the cultural, emotional and spatial resonance of our constructed surroundings. Like the exhibition’s title, “If stone could give”, the works on view blur the boundary between animate gestures and inanimate constructs.

The exhibition presents large and medium-scale photographs mounted on Dibond and frameless, leaning or hanging on supports within the environment. The presentation invites the viewer into a space of process and further blurs the lines between object and image.

“If stone could give” is Gallery Wendi Norris’ fifth offsite exhibition and is presented at 3344 24th Street in San Francisco. Built in 1924, the building boasts classic San Francisco architectural elements, including a small un-finished basement characterized by low ceilings and exposed framework. Like Nayar’s artworks, the space boasts juxtaposing characteristics of refined and raw, light-filled and cavernous, new and old. At the heart of the Mission District, the exhibition is adjacent nearby cultural institutions including the The 500 Capp Street Foundation, Kadist Foundation, Galería de la Raza, The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, The Women’s Building, Ratio 3 Gallery, Et Al. Gallery, and more.

Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris

The Sursock Museum is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Laure et Mazen : Correspondance(s), an exhibition of works by Laure Ghorayeb and Mazen Kerbaj.

The exhibition will open on Thursday 31 January 2019 from 18:00 to 21:00.
It will be on view until 26 August 2019.

Laure Ghorayeb is a poet, artist, and art critic. Mazen Kerbaj is an artist, illustrator, and musician. Together, they form one of the most touching artist duos. Their mediums of choice are technical pens, India ink, and paper. Sheets, sketchbooks, scraps, and rolls: paper in all its forms falls prey to the two accomplices.

Laure, the mother, is now 88 years old and at 44, her son Mazen is exactly half her age. Since 2006, and in parallel to their individual practice, they have developed a four-handed practice and unique style, where the minutiae of Laure’s strokes merge with Mazen’s big-nosed silhouettes. There is no need to recognize who does what in the flurry and entanglement of their drawings and correspondence: one need simply keep up with their frenzy and their limitless ambition.

Courtesy of  Sursock Museum

Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian work collectively to create installations, paintings, and stop-motion animations that transform found materials in order to critically examine contemporary history-in-the-making. The Dubai-based artists’ animations are composed from thousands of individual works on paper, in which they collage and paint over printed stills from internet videos and television newscasts. By detaching news imagery from its original context, this body of work estranges and opens up its encoded meanings while interrogating the entertainment value of reportage and the voyeuristic role of the spectator as a passive consumer of mass-media spectacle. The artists’ ultimate aim is to break down the “othering” effect of virtual bystanding and promote recognition of our social interdependency and the value of solidarity.

The Rain Doesn’t Know Friends from Foes surveys the animations the artists have made to date and features a selection of related works on paper. The presentation marks the US debut of From Sea to Dawn (2016–17) and Macht Schon (2016), which reflect on the global immigration crisis. Also included are Big Rock Candy Mountain (2015), in which artifacts toppled by ISIS militants thwart their censors by mutating into fanciful mythic beasts; Letter! (2014), which amplifies the performative, media-induced hysteria of a protest by the radical activist group Femen; Reign of Winter (2012–13), a grotesque adaptation of the coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding that underscores the arcane, densely coded nature of ceremonial spectacles; and Just What Is It that Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? (2010–11), in which media imagery from the 2009 Iranian demonstrations is transformed into a sordid pageant of monstrous animalistic humanoids. By turns joyously irreverent and intensely biting, the works presented here cast a satirical eye on representations of the present, foregrounding the irrationality and violence that underlie our hypermediated reality.

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

Sfeir-Semler Gallery Beirut is happy to present TIMO NASSERI’s solo show, after his presentations at our Beirut gallery in 2008, 2010 and 2015; the artist shows this time new works with A Universal Alphabet.

Timo Nasseri’s latest project takes as a starting point the patterns of the Razzle Dazzle, a camouflage used during World War I on boats, which was supposed to prevent the enemy from estimating their exact heading and position. The patterns consisted of geometrical shapes painted in contrasting colors, and their authorship was then claimed by three different people: the artist Norman Wilkinson, the zoologist John Graham Kerr, and Pablo Picasso.

This peculiar story leads Nasseri to deconstruct the camouflage patterns to their smallest unit, uncovering their primary shapes. The lines and colors that appear carry the echo of primitive cultures from Latin America, Africa and Asia; revealing a graphical alphabet used around the globe since the dawn of times, until it reached European warships at the turn of the 20th century.

In his work, Timo Nasseri reflects on the universality of these patterns. Experimenting with matter, he deciphers a visual code that brings these shapes to life through three-meter-high sculptures, or breaks them apart in a multitude of black folded metal signs. The ships themselves land on three-meter-high canvases and become totems or giant insects mirroring a return to origins.

The exhibition also presents drawings and sculptures inspired by the studies of Jacob Steiner (1796 – 1863), a Swiss mathematician known for his contributions to the development of modern synthetic geometry. Nasseri uses these ideas to explore quantum theory within his larger discourse on infinity. These principles ultimately lead to the belief in parallel universes, endlessly expanding across all probabilities; linking to a series of star charts which draw on Jorge Luis Borges “The Library of Babel” and reveals omnipresent elements that can only be perceived based on the viewer’s standpoint.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to invite to Beirut internationally renowned Swiss artists GERDA STEINER & JÖRG LENZLINGER. Since 1997, Steiner & Lenzlinger have been developing site-specific installations that carry deep social and environmental concerns. Responding to the current ecological crisis in Lebanon, their exhibition in Beirut opens on Thursday January 17 at 7:00 PM.

Steiner & Lenzlinger create installations that blur the lines between fantasy and reality; using both natural and artificial elements specific to their discourse. While visiting Lebanon, they collected waste, as well as plants, combined to create what feels like an enchanted forest in which visitors can get lost.

Around the gallery in the Quarantine district and on the beaches of Beirut, Steiner & Lenzlinger had no difficulty finding garbage which becomes almost poetic in the context of their installation. Plants were carefully selected, conveying the unheard voices of ecological causes in Lebanon. Additionally, a collection of seeds is presented, gathered from Terbol, Lebanon through the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Arid Areas (ICARDA), whose mission is to preserve and develop agricultural capital in Africa and Asia. The Bisri Valley in South Lebanon, and the dam project that will flood several hectares of land and plants, was also a source of inspiration for the artists.

The exhibition highlights a crude reality, which visitors encounter through the lens of the duo’s ephemeral and hybrid universe. The surreal fantasy they create transports the viewer into a fabricated magical world, that cheerfully mixes organic elements and chemical fertilizer on which the installation will feed to grow and morph throughout the exhibition.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Sfeir-Semler Gallery is happy to invite to Beirut internationally renowned Swiss artists GERDA STEINER & JÖRG LENZLINGER. Since 1997, Steiner & Lenzlinger have been developing site-specific installations that carry deep social and environmental concerns. Responding to the current ecological crisis in Lebanon, their exhibition in Beirut opens on Thursday January 17 at 7:00 PM.

Steiner & Lenzlinger create installations that blur the lines between fantasy and reality; using both natural and artificial elements specific to their discourse. While visiting Lebanon, they collected waste, as well as plants, combined to create what feels like an enchanted forest in which visitors can get lost.

Around the gallery in the Quarantine district and on the beaches of Beirut, Steiner & Lenzlinger had no difficulty finding garbage which becomes almost poetic in the context of their installation. Plants were carefully selected, conveying the unheard voices of ecological causes in Lebanon. Additionally, a collection of seeds is presented, gathered from Terbol, Lebanon through the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Arid Areas (ICARDA), whose mission is to preserve and develop agricultural capital in Africa and Asia. The Bisri Valley in South Lebanon, and the dam project that will flood several hectares of land and plants, was also a source of inspiration for the artists.

The exhibition highlights a crude reality, which visitors encounter through the lens of the duo’s ephemeral and hybrid universe. The surreal fantasy they create transports the viewer into a fabricated magical world, that cheerfully mixes organic elements and chemical fertilizer on which the installation will feed to grow and morph throughout the exhibition.

Courtesy of Sfeir-Semler Gallery

Exhibiting the work of Irving Penn to mark the opening of a new center for contemporary image production is a mission statement, one that embraces the history of photography and the work of the late masters while looking to the future. Penn’s work is a monument of epic artistic resilience, a major reference for contemporary photography and an endless source of inspiration for generations to come.

All the photographs that appear in this exhibition are drawn from the Pinault Collection. Although in date they span more than four decades, they are presented not as a retrospective but are loosely arranged by subject.

Penn was first and foremost a studio photographer. His photographs, with their simple backdrops of paper, canvas, or bare wall, establish a spatial container at once formal and insular. Whether haute couture, still life, ethnography, or memento mori, the image is decontextualized, intense and demanding of attention.

Penn’s subjects appear at first glance to be quite disparate – celebrities, skulls, cigarette butts. But removed from their natural environment and with an unflinching focus on their materiality, they achieve a democratic leveling that is the signature of Penn’s style. Each subject is equal under his gaze, a quiet yet insistent intruder into the neutral space of the studio.