EXHIBITIONS
Azza Abo Rabieh is a Syrian artist living in Beirut. Her work, sensitive and sensuous, moves with dexterity between painting, drawing and printmaking, her subtle shapes and lines developing in a seamless eroticism between technique and form.
Her work inhabits this world in a state of lightness, almost play, almost delicate, almost crude. In her exacting surfaces there is a truth to experience, to hope, to what could be if only we would see, feel, perhaps abandon ourselves to depth.
Layers upon layers of closely woven tulle or net are arranged carefully yet definitely on surfaces, creating precise and delicate counterpoints to line, a sensitive depth of colour to match their strength. Without knowing we know that the layers are many, the depth is clear. Depth again, lightness again.
Lightness meets depth, dives to the deeps of the sea and finds yet a lightness there, a joy, eroticism, that is exactly as it is, as it feels to be in the lightness and depths of great passion, of sex, of love. The lightness is that of becoming one, the depth of the experience, touch. The simple and joyful confusion of bodies, hearts, minds.
Azza Abo Rebieh (Syria, b.1980) obtained her degree in printmaking from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Damascus University in 2002. Initially interested in etching and engraving, she has extended her work to encompass an array of media and materials, including watercolor, thread and tulle on canvas, ink painting, and printing on leather.
Abo Rebieh held her first solo exhibitions in 2018 and 2019 at 392 Rmeil (Beirut, Lebanon) managed and curated by Nelsy Massoud, and in 2022 she held her solo exhibition, ‘Yearning’ at Saleh Barakat Gallery. In 2024 she held a solo exhibition and performance titled ‘111’ at Majaz gallery (Beirut, Lebanon). She has participated in more than fifteen group exhibitions and has been the recipient of three awards for artistic work including First prize in the Damascus Annual Youth Exhibition (2006). Abo Rebieh’s work is held in a number of notable collections including the British Museum (London), Musee de l’institute du Monde Arabe (Paris), Dalloul Foundation (Lebanon), Atassi Foundation (Syria) and the Ostrobothnian Museum Vaasa (Finland).
The work of French-Lebanese artist Gabrielle Bejani is dream-like, yet somehow defined, deliberate. Although in a state of continual flux, her vibrant paper landscapes are imbued with a kind of undulating geometry, a certain regularity coming up against more organic surfaces shaped by ceaselessly shifting edges, colours, textures, lines, and a cast of characters with a resonance both highly personal and yet recognisable to the viewer. Myriad shades of muted and jewel-like blues, reds and browns, colour rich landscapes of sky-like space, while half-remembered narratives take shape among them.
The haunting presence that proliferates her work is grounded in materiality, the delicate tearing, cutting and arranging of pieces as much a part of the whole as the mushrooming forms and scenographies that dance with fluidity across her compositions. Bejani’s created world gives a feeling of rhythmic, almost metronomic movement, in an environment too large, almost sublime, in its awe-inspiring scale. Her figures, when they appear, perhaps on a boat, or simply curled around themselves, are tiny yet distinct against vast backdrops, almost, but not quite swallowed by the places in which they find themselves.
Here is a stamp of Lebanon, gently placed, tiny among a vast night sky peppered with stars. Her stamps, like her figures, seem to mark the scene with a scale incommensurate with their surroundings; such a small and mobile mark in all that wide, endless space. A deliberate gesture, such lightness and such weight.
Gabrielle Bejani was born in Paris, France in 1995. She is a French Lebanese artist currently based in London. In 2018 she received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2023 completed her MFA at Slade School of Fine Art (London). Since graduating she has participated in numerous exhibitions in London, Paris, New York and across Europe.
An American who has lived outside of America for more than fifteen years, Everitte Barbee takes seriously the implicit and explicit ideals of his home country. In fact, the rules of American, and indeed western, society at large, seem to fascinate him; the rules, and how they are broken. While the form of his work rests comfortably within an established tradition of Arabic calligraphy, it is clear that the subject rests far outside of the Arab world, that American culture is Barbee’s central theme. Barbee’s evident fascination with the hypocrisy that he sees at the root of Western culture tracks through his art works - Arabic calligraphy satirizing American values. Yet, despite an evident ambivalence towards his home country, the work of Barbee is not cynical, rather is rooted in disappointment, a disappointment in that insincerity that he sees at the heart of a culture that he was born into, is somehow still a part of. And indeed, while Arabic calligraphy is perhaps his most sustained practice to date, his studies in technique are not limited to this genre, rather he is interested in the broader source of culture, the roots of the world. Why do we love art, he asks – a lack of comprehension, the sacred. Barbee longs for the sacred, a return to Eden, roots, something to hold on to.
Through his artworks themselves, as well as his identity as an American artist living in Lebanon, Barbee seeks to challenge what he sees as the misleading narratives of the region that are often told to Americans. By living in the middle east, and in making the work that he does, he seeks to show America that they do not understand this world as well as they might think, to complicate narratives, open minds. His message to America, the western world at large - Arab culture is deep, ancient and kind.
There is a clarity in Barbee’s vision for a world without hypocrisy, seeking this through a return to art as sacred lack of comprehension. Until then, he will present his truth.