EXHIBITIONS
This exhibition pays tribute to Farid Trad, a witness of a time sealed away since 1969. Farid Trad was an architect-engineer marking the several fields within and around the profession, its pedagogy, and its organization. His career spanned 43 years, from 1926 until he died in 1969. Born under the Ottoman period and educated under the French mandate in Lebanon and later in France, this exceptional figure eventually became one of the builders of the Lebanese Republic. He was the founding member of numerous institutions, including the ALBA, since the founding of its Architecture school in 1943 and the Order of Engineers and Architects in 1951, for which he served a year as president and occupied several positions and responsibilities in administration and was a member of the higher council of planning. As a staunch modernist, Trad fought with conviction for the planning of Beirut and the resolution of social housing within the city and in other towns and villages. He was a stern critic of the so-called Ecochard plan and had developed his urban study for Beirut, resolving crucial issues that were never addressed to this day.
Rather than synthesizing this constellation of artworks into a singular vision, the works reveal each artist's journey within and around early modernism. While some were friends, others were masters.
What quiet places, full of possibility
It has softness, the coal, not the silky softness of a child (we will return to the child) but dense, wild, and somehow mute, a softness that refuses speech, sound.
Baalbaki’s coal structures are familiar if ambiguous. Neo-classical architecture melds with places of worship, old forms that creak and tug, slipping between the civic, philanthropic, religious. But it is the material that takes over, seizes the mind and pulls us into form, The joy of the attempt, the human in the world.
This work began in innocent instinct, the coal seen as children’s blocks for building. Through play Baalbaki works his way deep into soft blackness and out into the adult world. From there, he renders what are perhaps the most adult of edifices, temple, church, mosque, museum, bank.
It’s a work of faith, a reach for connection felt more than explained. In the softness of coal, its healing, velvet coat, and in our knowledge of its properties, its scarcity, its increasingly golden allegory, there is a contemplative moment, a reflection on what it is that drives us, what we really need.
"and the smell of the flowers"
28 July - 2 September, 2023
Washes of earthy greens, ocean blues, cold greys, and dreamy pinks draw the spaces within which Amy Todman narrates around windows. The painted mark on the canvas morphs into part of a picturesque landscape, while washes in acrylic reveal the painting hand and its double on the canvas. At moments, the white windows sever parts of bodies and landscape; at others, they appear as canvases embraced by bodies and reflecting them. The canvas object becomes a riddle echoed in its doubling within each of Todman's framed windows. Scenes of her domestic space seep into the frame as the table, bed, and sleeping bodies reappear as themselves, their shadow, or their painted other. The artist marks the windows, opens them, and plunges into them while the translucence of her vision is mounted around an oceanic feeling that attributes tension to the theme of the window, dissolving its frame. Amidst the openings she creates, appear vignettes that stand between dream and waking life, a glass of water becomes its stains, a bitten fruit manifests as a fragment, and objects acquire creaturely limbs that stain the canvas. Todman's works lace the beautiful with the sublime while knotting the gesture of painting with being and dwelling.
Selected recent solo exhibitions include The Partial Foreground (Henrik Igyityan National Centre for Aesthetics, Yerevan, Armenia) and From Here to There (Dalan Art Gallery, Yerevan, Armenia). She has published two poetry collections, Twig (2019) and G(love) (Sad Press, 2018) as well as the artist book Cover (Brae Editions, 2014).
She holds a fine art degree from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (Dundee, Scotland), an MLitt in the History of Collecting and Collections from the University of Glasgow and a PhD, which examines the development of the idea of landscape in Britain during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Latterly, she was Curator of Art and Political Collections at the National Library of Scotland, in the department of Manuscripts and Archives.
In 2018 she took a decision to re-focus on her art practice, finding her way, via Armenia, to Lebanon, where the warm and intelligent heart of Beirut has had a profound and enduring impact on her painting, poetry, and her understanding of the world.