This exhibition is organized with the exceptional support of the Musée national Picasso-Paris in the framework of “Picasso-Méditerranée,” and with the collaboration of the Lebanese Ministry of Culture.

With the generous contribution of Danièle Edgar de Picciotto and the support of Cyril Karaoglan.

Picasso et la famille explores Pablo Picasso’s (1881-1973) relationship to the notion of the family nucleus, encompassing everything from motherhood to children’s games, from the representation of conceptual intimacy to the numerous experiences of a fatherhood spent under the spotlight. Bringing together drawings, etchings, paintings, and sculptures, the exhibition spans seventy-seven years of creation, from 1895 to 1972, through a selection of works marking notable moments in the artist’s long emotional and family life, whose variety of forms illustrates the constant reinvention of his artistic vocabulary. For Picasso, the word “family” evokes, first and foremost, its Spanish meaning of a restricted, intimate and discreet circle, and a fertile source of inspiration for developing themes such as the love of femininity, the image of the couple, the mysteries of childhood, the simple pleasure of sharing, and the solemnity of private moments. Yet the family is also a means to explore even more universal themes such as the cruelty of war and the passing of time, and to reflect on the history of art and its motifs. Through this lens, theoeuvre of the Spanish master appears in a particular light, independent of periods and styles, rather evoking an immediacy of creation.

Picasso et la famille is curated by Camille Frasca and Yasmine Chemali.

Courtesy of Sursock Museum.

Mark Hachem is delighted to announce the Exclusive Representation of Master Hussein Madi.

In this exhibition, we will be showing four main eras of Madi’s art: his sculptures depicting birds, women, and movement through the use of geometrical shapes, his abstract paintings of women, his acrylic paintings depicting bright and bold shapes layered on top of one another, and finally his striking monochromatic prints of women on black paper. Through his work, we see the influence of the things that have shaped his life and his art equally.

Madi is a master in both painting and sculpture, something that is relatively rare in the art world, and his style varies throughout his works, going from kinetic to abstract to oriental art. He himself states that his art does not fit under a single movement, choosing rather to name it ‘The art of Madi’. Simply put, it can be defined as contemporary oriental art, though it is clear through the variety of the works and media that it is far more. The artist has been creating his pieces since the nineteen-fifties, and his style has been evolving consistently throughout the years. This exhibition will focus mainly on his most recent works, spanning the twenty-first century, and will demonstrate his understanding of art and his personal perception of it. After so many years working the trade, he is familiar with how he views his work and how he views the world, though he has never remained stagnant in his art. It is constantly growing and changing, from the medium to the use of colour to the style. He continues to discover more about himself and how he creates. After living and working in Italy for 22 years, Madi returned indefinitely to Lebanon in 1987. He never completely left Lebanon and from his Italian years of 1964 and 1986, Madi frequently visited his home country and remained contributing to the Lebanese art scene through solo exhibitions and teaching painting and sculpture.

Courtesy of  Mark Hachem

Mashrabia Gallery of Contemporary Art announces the fourth edition of “My Favorite Things” as the season’s opening exhibition. Meant as a platform to promote and encourage promising young women artists, this year it expands its reach, featuring a new and larger group of Egyptian artists, as well as two special foreign guests Gabriela Kobus and Courtney Crawford experimenting with contemporary artistic practices and media.

“My Favorite Things 4” by Amany Nabil, Aya Badawy, Aya Gamil, Alaa Ayman Hassan, Courtney Crawford, Gabriela Kobus, Heba Abu El Ella, Mona Essam, Marwa Saad, Marwa Talaat, Nourhan Mayouf, Nesreen Mamdouh.

Courtesy of Mashrabia Gallery

An Exploration of Our Digital Presence
This exhibition invites us to look at the various facets of our immaterial digital universe,
unravelling its impact on humanity through multidisciplinary art forms.

Opening Saturday, September 14, 2019 at 6 pm
MACAM launches its 2nd BIENNALE of Contemporary Art with the topic ‘Universal Data’.
Behind the massive rustic gate of the industrial museum, over 60 Lebanese and international artists will be showcasing multidisciplinary artworks that explore our use and interaction with this ever-increasing digitalized universe.

Artists from over twenty nationalities reflect on contemporary topics, such as access to information, digital identity, freedom of expression and online communities. The featured artworks challenge our perspective on , making it more tangible through art installations, paintings, sculptures, videos, digital and live performance art.

In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, artists have been asked to reflect on how these articles apply (if at all) in this new digital era and on how access to data has influenced our perception of the world.

These questions have birthed thought-provoking and inquisitive works of art about hacking, security leaks, the fragility of manipulation of data and equal access to data, amongst others. A vast subject worth exploring more in-depth.

Nabil Nahas’s latest solo exhibition will revolve around his fractal paintings. The fractal is a mathematical object, in which every component part identically corresponds to the whole.The fractal, part and whole, in Nahas’s work is analogous to the geometry of nature in its laws, processes, and overall logic. Each work is composed through the execution of the boundless interweaving and enfolding of different moments that constitute differential and variegated compositions, while always yielding a singular artwork. In gesturing from the finite to the infinite, Nahas alludes to a Sufi transcendentalist aesthetic, wherein the sublime in both its natural and architectural forms is evoked (think the Islamic architectural feature of the muqarnas), and the elasticity of scale between the part (micro) and the whole (macro) is preserved.

Courtesy of Saleh Barakat Gallery

‘I look at America’s heart – people, landscapes, and cityscapes – and I see it as an opportunity to add to an American art narrative…I paint because I am looking for versions of myself in art history and in the world.’
—Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald documents contemporary black experience through arresting, otherworldly paintings. Drawing upon the American Realist tradition, she subverts the medium of portraiture to tease out unexpected narratives and situate black heritage centrally in the story of American art. With ‘the heart of the matter…,’ her inaugural exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, Sherald debuts a suite of new paintings that reinforces the multiplicities of African-American life and invites viewers to reconsider commonly accepted notions of race and representation.

Courtesy of  Hauser & Wirth

The title of the exhibition is a clear indication of the role of this natural element in my life. My home and studio, located on a branch of the Hawkesbury River, are accessible only by boat. This means water, in all its moods, is ever present to me. A very different setting in Fiji played an equally significant role in inspiring this exhibition. I received a commission in 2016-17 for paintings on Kokomo Island. Here, with views to Great Astrolabe Reef, the contrast in light was obvious and the paintings explore this tropical perspective in terms of the visual intensity of colour, movement and texture. As a result, the exhibition is a reflection of these two aspects of my life: the peaceful, moody river and the vibrant tropical island.

Courtesy of Soho Galleries Sydney

Shawki Youssef’s paintings are about processes of thoughts and inquiries into what matters. Matter is physical substance, which is allegedly distinct from the mind, the spirit, and energy. Youssef’s habitual and almost obsessive subject, the human body, dissolves or vanishes, and is replaced by tables/beds. Tables, beds, and human bodies blend in the emerging space they occupy to assert that they are made up of the same matter. Delicate lines, shades, and transparencies of color interact with the white and textured surface of the canvas, giving ethereal form to things—tables, human figures, walls, etc.— that transmit, like when touching, this “uncanny sense of the other,” of oneself, and “the transience of matter’s existence.”

Courtesy of Agial Art Gallery

“My cages are homes of hopes. And I put a lot of things in the cages. It’s the opposite of what some people think: I do not consider what I put in cages imprisoned, but preserved, made safe.” Parviz Tanavoli, 1976

The West Vancouver Art Museum is delighted to present this exhibition of work by the eminent Iranian-Canadian artist, Parviz Tanavoli. A resident of West Vancouver for over three decades, Tanavoli is among Canada’s most significant contemporary artists. This exhibition will feature work that spans his six-decade career, focusing on his wearable art and small sculptures, prints and paintings of birds, cages and locks. The artist has returned repeatedly to these forms, allowing him to explore the themes of freedom, nothingness, poetry and history, while playing with his viewer’s awareness of traditional function and meaning. Just as he subverts the accepted meaning of a cage, he explores dualisms that manifest themselves as both significant and trivial, a poet contrasting the everyday with the remarkable.

Courtesy of West Vancouver Art Museum.

We are thrilled to announce that Ramin Haerizadeh, Rokni Haerizadeh, and Hesam Rahmanian will be participating in Homeless Souls at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

Taking up themes of exile and expatriation, the exhibition presents a number of exceptional international artists, whose work speaks directly to our conflict-ridden times. Hailing from countries as diverse as Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Algeria and Kosovo, the artists work from their own stories and experiences, which they examine and treat in art that is both topical and timeless, universal and highly personal.

Homeless Souls brings together a dozen artistic voices from countries around the world for a conversation about exile as a political and existential reality. Presenting both personal and collective stories, the exhibition adds new perspectives to subjects like exile, demarcation, citizenship, cross-border movements, secret journeys and identity.

Several of the works are made especially for this exhibition. The participating artists in the exhibition are: Kader Attia (b. 1970, France), Tiffany Chung (b. 1969, Vietnam), Forensic Oceanography (Lorenzo Pezzani (b. 1982, Italy) & Charles Heller (b. 1981, US), Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976, India), Ramin Haerizadeh (b. 1975, Iran), Rokni Haerizadeh (b. 1978, Iran), Hesam Rahmanian (b. 1980, US), Petrit Halilaj (b. 1986, Kosovo), Hiwa K (b. 1975, Iraq), Nalini Malani (b. 1946. Born in Karachi, undivided India), Otobong Nkanga (b. 1974, Nigeria), Erkan Özgen (b. 1971, Turkey), Lydia Ourahmane (b. 1992, Algeria), Kara Walker (b. 1969, US)

Courtesy of Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde

From the glimmer of a jewel to the sheen of armour, Bermejo’s ability to capture light, colours and textures in oil painting was unparalleled in 15th-century Spain.

Though fewer than 20 works by the artist are known and much of his life remains something of a mystery, Bermejo’s paintings set him apart as a technically skilled and visionary master.

Bringing together seven of his rare works, six of which have never been seen in the UK, this exhibition explores how Bermejo drew inspiration from Netherlandish painting, using illusionistic effects and a rich colour palette, to become one of the greatest artists of the Spanish Renaissance.

Courtesy of The National Gallery

Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture presents La Mer Patrie, a joint exhibition of photographers Fouad Elkoury and Jeremy Peacock.

La Mer Patrie comprises of a series of photographs by Elkoury and Peacock, which illustrate a part of the lives of Palestinians in Beirut in the early 1980s, the departure of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation from Beirut to Tunis and their arrival in Palestine within the Gaza–Jericho Agreement.

The exhibition, which includes around fifty photographs and an installation, questions the notion of return by revisiting a significant era of the Palestinian cause. Moreover, the choice of exhibited photographs intends to examine the stereotypical image of Palestine and the role of Palestinians in creating such an image.

La Mer Patrie is curated by Manal Khader.

Courtesy of Dar El-Nimer

The new season at the Palazzo Cini Gallery opens with an exceptional exhibition: the first solo show ever staged in Italy by Adrian Ghenie (b. 1977), entitled The Battle between Carnival and Feast.

Following significant projects in prestigious venues, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Venice Biennale and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Fondazione Cini hosts a show by the highly acclaimed Romanian painter in an unprecedented dialogue with the rooms and history of the house-museum of the Palazzo Cini. For the occasion, Ghenie exhibits a series of nine stunning paintings, some on show for the first time, inspired by the history of Venice, but always linked to the more controversial, darker issues of today’s world. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.

Courtesy of Palazzo Cini Gallery