EXHIBITIONS
Bassam Kahwagi is a painter who deals consistently with the limitations of the act of painting. Rebellious by nature and in his work, Kahwagi’s practice is a continual experiment in the possibilities of instinct and form. This exhibition, his first solo show in five years, takes the grid as its guide, the line as a vital force, and colour as a tool through which to uncover the limitless combinations that create and define the experience of looking. Kahwagi’s is a practice expressive of what it means to be informed by experience but not consumed into it. He sees the world, lets it enter him and then sends it back out, losing on the way the recognisable form of the external world for a different order, a different idea of order. Not quite internal, he finds a moment between instinct and world, honed through practice, rigour and method.
In Kahwagi’s unstoried paintings image is optical, complex and layered. He first moves his mind out of his body through a practice of drawing that is an in-depth archive of trials, games and motions. During these sessions he works methodically, a stack of paper beside him. While he does at times refer back to these many ordered piles, for Kahwagi this looking is more a remembrance of the moment of drawing than to notice specific drawings, shapes, line, colour.
Kahwagi is an artist who takes in from the world and then throws out that very world onto paper and canvas, jettisoning as he does so the parts that seem superfluous. What is left from his process are the lines, colours and forms that speak the most clearly to him, a language which defies easy categorisation and points to the absolute power of these aspects of art-making to shift and challenge the way one looks, sees and comprehends the world on and off the canvas.
Bassam Kahwagi was born in 1963, Beirut, Lebanon. Between 1982 and 1986 he attended several private art schools in Paris, foremost of which is Atelier Nicolas Poussin with Maurice Guillon for painting and sculpture. From 1990 to 1993 he attended several workshops in etching and lithographic print-making techniques. Between 1987 and 1994 he held a number of solo exhibitions in Paris and in Lebanon before
In October 2023, during the first weeks of the genocide in Gaza, Dia al-Azzawi made a series of twelve charcoal drawings called Nights of Extermination. In these works, centred on the eyes of the victims, aerial aggressions take the form of vicious birds of prey, billowing smoke and unknown objects raining from the skies, while scattered body parts are heaped in the confusion of widespread casualty and death. The innocent victims stare directly out of Azzawi’s drawings in obvious distress, entreating the viewer’s sympathy at the unfairness and hopelessness of their desperate fate.
In a 2025 daftar (or artist’s book) called Gaza: the Pain that Opened My Daughter’s Eyes, Azzawi overlays faces of innocent victims in black and white with red paint to represent both their suffering and the secondary agony of witnessing atrocities through journalism and social media, an experience of painful awakening that he observed in his own daughter, which is further signified by artist’s own handprint of testimony (also in red paint).
These recent works about Gaza can be viewed as a continuation of Azzawi’s ongoing series Land of Darkness (1991–present), which began with a set of charcoal drawings about Iraqi civilians and a diarised daftar called Book of Darkness, during the 1991 Gulf War. At the same time, they are also part of Azzawi’s continued efforts to highlight injustice against Palestinians, which can be seen in his work from the early 1970s onwards, as a symbol for the unfairness of global inequality and all corrupt political systems: this criticism is at the heart of the works displayed in the solo exhibition ‘False Witnesses’.
constant
all that is movement
There is a gentle contradiction that flows through the work of Lebanese painter and poet Afaf Zurayk, a constancy and yet continual movement that grows and flourishes in the complex folds and spaces of her paintings and her words.
White canvas holds, a line moving with and against, a sparse, caring motion. There is an endlessness to the spaces that Zurayk deftly shapes, a glimmer of emergence, then disappearance, re-emergence, a quiet skimming of the surface of form, experience and emotion, then again submergence, coming up again as if for air, breath. This is how a life might be described, all of life.
While this work enters with such lightness, as if alighting at the very corner of thought, yet if confronted, or perhaps just looked at squarely, the experience deepens, continues, gives more, does not disappear in the moment, recedes only to return.
This doubling, the glimpse and the continuation, the constant and enduring, the light and ephemeral.
To know the way to depth from light and back again.
The subtle and mutable line
the material life.
In the words of Zurayk,
containing the darkness and contained by it.Afaf Zurayk is a Lebanese American artist, writer and educator.
Afaf Zurayk is a Lebanese American artist, writer and educator. Her artistic and writing practices seek transparency in depicting the color of light, guiding the audience through turbulence towards acceptance. Zurayk graduated with a B.A. in Fine Arts (with distinction) from the American University of Beirut in 1970 and earned an M.A. in Fine Arts from Harvard University.
Zurayk has exhibited her art extensively and has been reviewed in The Washington Post, the Washington Review, Al-Hayat and L’Orient–Le Jour among other publications. Her art is in the collections of the British Museum, London, UK; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; the Sursock Museum, Beirut, Lebanon; and Darat al - Funun, Amman, Jordan. She is represented by Saleh Barakat Gallery in Beirut, Lebanon.