More than six years after his passing, Nabil Kanso (1940–2019) returns to the city where his story began. Darkness and Light (Part I), opening at DAC Beirut on 23 July, marks the first major solo exhibition of the Lebanese-born artist in his homeland, bringing together works that span over five decades of an uncompromising practice. Long recognised by artists and scholars yet often overlooked by the broader art world, Kanso is now receiving renewed international attention through recent acquisitions by institutions including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and Beirut’s Sursock Museum, alongside critical reassessments that position him among the defining painters of the modern Arab world.
Bringing together paintings, archival material and works produced between the 1970s and 2010s, the exhibition offers a broad survey of an artist whose practice remained inseparable from the political realities of his time. At its centre are paintings from The Split of Life series alongside monumental works responding to the Lebanese Civil War, including Lebanon (1983), Lebanon 1977: Vortices of Wrath and Blazing Vortices: Lebanon Summer of 1982 (Sabra and Shatila). Running in parallel, the Dalloul Art Foundation presents Darkness and Light (Part II), bringing together all 242 drawings from Leaves from the Theatre of War (1980–1992), on view from 29 July until 25 September 2026. Across the two venues, the exhibition forms the most comprehensive presentation of Kanso’s oeuvre ever shown in Lebanon.
Born in Beirut in 1940, Kanso left Lebanon to study in London before settling in New York during the 1960s, where he established an expansive international practice. Although he lived abroad for much of his life, Lebanon remained a constant point of reference, shaping both his personal history and artistic imagination. His paintings bear witness to conflicts that marked the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, extending beyond Lebanon to Vietnam, Iraq and Syria, while continually returning to the enduring consequences of war on human lives.
Working on an ambitious scale, Kanso developed a distinctive visual language defined by saturated colour, expressive brushwork and densely layered compositions. Literature, mythology, music, and biblical narratives informed his paintings as much as contemporary history, allowing individual conflicts to resonate as universal reflections on violence, exile, and resilience. His practice consistently resisted spectacle, focusing instead on memory, dignity and the shared human condition.
This exhibition arrives at a moment when Kanso’s work feels strikingly prescient. Long before global institutions began reassessing his contribution, he was producing paintings that questioned indifference, challenged historical amnesia and insisted on art’s capacity to confront injustice. Darkness and Light not only restores one of Lebanon’s most significant modern painters to his cultural landscape, but also offers an opportunity to reconsider an oeuvre whose urgency has only deepened with time.
Location: Dalloul Artist Collective (DAC), Beirut, Lebanon
Duration: 24 July until 19 September 2026