EXHIBITIONS

Hiba Kalache

Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite
Curated by Natasha Gasparian

Hiba Kalache presents works on paper, paintings, a connective body of sculptures, and an installation. She draws in her painting and she writes with her brush. Her gestures are vigorous yet intricate, scribbly à la Twombly. Her practice is one of écriture. To use Roland Barthes’ now-old French neologism, her painting is scriptible: its hermeneutic, symbolic, historic, and semic codes open up to an indeterminacy in the reading of both her work and its own textual references. Grand in scale, layered and ambiguous, it does not reaffirm what is mythologized. There is no singular unity in its composition, no universe that is total or whole. Kalache’s work demands a reception that is both distant and intimate, and in return, it promises jouissance akin, and yet antithetical to divine rapture.

Born in Beirut, Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Kalache draws on her daily life for her materials – often extra-artistic – and process. In 2005, Kalache received a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She has since exhibited in Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, New Orleans, Oakland, San

Jose (USA), San Francisco, and Tehran. Her work has also been shown at art fairs including Art Dubai, Drawing Now (Paris), and Gwangju Art (South Korea). Recent group exhibitions include Mimesis Expression Construction (2016) curated by Octavian Esanu at the American University of Beirut’s Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Heartland (2015) curated by Joanna Chevalier at the Beirut Exhibition Center, and Under Construction, Exposure (2014) curated by Marie Muracciole at the Beirut Art Center. In 2012, she had solo shows in Beirut with The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, and the FFA Private Bank. In 2017, she taught fine arts at the Lebanese American University.

Hiba Kalache
Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite
11 May - 30 June, 2018

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Nadia Safieddine
Woman in a Stream
19 April - 19 May, 2018

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Nadia Safieddine

“The Twilight turns from amethyst
To deep and deeper blue,
The lamp fills with a pale green glow
The trees of the avenue.

The old piano plays an air,
Sedate and slow and gay;
She bends upon the yellow keys,
Her head inclines this way.

Shy thoughts and grave wide eyes and hands
That wander as they list –
The twilight turns to darker blue

– Poem II, from Chamber Music, James Joyce (1907)

In her latest collection of paintings, Nadia Safieddine diversifies the subject matter of her work by shifting the focus from lugubrious, distorted, and barely-visible figures to something – a landscape? – more definitely abstract. She takes as her starting point a classical reference:
Rembrandt’s painting A Woman Bathing in a Stream. Half of the works on display fall within the category of the nude and the portrait, but her latest move toward the non-pictorial intimates that her three categories of painting are not as separate as in the classical distinction of genres. Painted with a technique of impasto, all of Safieddine’s work is enmeshed in the dialectical relationship between abstract expressionism and figuration.

Nadia Safieddine (b. 1973) is a Beirut-based artist. She received a Diploma in Painting from the Lebanese University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1997. Having lived and worked in Berlin between 2002 and 2012, she had the following solo exhibitions: Light (2010) in Schloss Altranft, Lost (2006) in Galerie Orange, Hungry Faces (2006) in Galerie Damensalon, Gleis 3 (2005) in Stiftung SPI, and Hommage aux Absents (2005) at Gallerie ten21. In Beirut, her solo exhibitions include Elegy (2015), Badroom (2013), and Time (2011) in Agial Art Gallery.