For Beirut With Love

BIOGRAPHIES
Michel Abboud is a Lebanese painter,
sculptor and architect who was born in
1977, in Beirut, Lebanon. After completing a
Masters in Architecture at the University of
Columbia in New York, he founded an awardwinning
architectural practice, SOMA. His
designs, notably the Park 51 Islamic Cultural
Center a few blocks from Ground Zero in
New York City or the One at Palm Jumeirah
in Dubai, have attracted critical acclaim for
their boundary-pushing nature.
In recent years, Michel Abboud has begun
to combine art and architecture first by
conceiving large-scale parametric sculptures
and then by creating complex and intricate
abstract paintings. For the latter, he uses
a variety of techniques and materials. He
experiments with the texture of paint and the
way it is applied onto the surfaces as well as
with the support itself: the canvas, stripping it
from its frame, slicing and folding it. Through
his different series (Gemini, Layered, Folded,
etc…) he creates two and three-dimensional
very unique artworks, obscuring the
boundaries between painting and sculpture.
His work is rooted and linked to his heritage,
heavily influenced by his childhood in a wartorn
environment, exuding emotions that can
only make one reflect on the nature of one’s
inner conflicts.
Michel Abboud is the recipient of numerous
awards and his artworks are held in many
prestigious public and private collections
worldwide. He lives and works in New York City.
Yasmina Alaoui is of French and Moroccan
descent, born in New York in 1977. She
studied Fine Arts at the École du Louvre in
Paris, and earned a BA in Sculpture from the
College of William and Mary, Williamsburg.
She currently lives in New York city.
The underlying themes behind all her
works deal directly with her experiences of
multicultural upbringing and aims to bridge
extremes by embracing opposites: secular
and holy, classical and contemporary, order
and chaos, repulsion and attraction. She
creates complex and intricate visual works
using a wide variety of techniques, which
she combines in an authentic manner. Alaoui
has collaborated with photographer Marco
Guerra on the Tales of beauty and 1001
Dreams series, which have been collected
and exhibited internationally since 2003.
Since then, Alaoui has diversified her projects,
stating that her love for different media leads
her to use as many as she can, constantly
shifting between sculpture, painting, drawing,
fashion and jewelry design, film making and
musical composition.
She was the recipient of the Award for Cultural
Diversity at the 2018 Dakar Biennale.
Sundus Al Khalidi was born and raised in
Baghdad, Iraq. She graduated from the
Fine Arts College of Baghdad University
to pursue a passion she was born with. In
2003, she moved to Lebanon, where she
currently lives with her family. Sundus Al
Khalidi has believed that both reality and
imagination reflect her mission. Her practice
offers a feminine, expressionist approach to
the world. Her paintings are inspired by the
world of dreams, and visions from the edge
of consciousness.
Captivated by the wonders around her,
her Art is natural, symbiotic. She creates
compositions inviting the eye to contemplate
the abstract reality in her work.
Al Khalidi’s work has been selected for several
personal and group exhibitions around the
world: 4*4 Exhibition, Italy, 1999; Different
Dimensions, Germany, 2000; Plastic Arts, Italy
and Spain, 2002; The Beauty of Nature-USEK,
Lebanon, 2018.
Constantly inspired by her surroundings,
her paintings came into life to illustrate the
world from her own perspective: a canvas of
feelings and beauty.
James Austin Murray is an American painter
born in 1969. After graduating from Parsons
School of design, he spent some time in
France, Slovakia and Hungary.
Murray’s practice has evolved from more
figurative drawings to his current signature
black paintings. He has pursued, for the
last decade, a gesture-based approach to
monochrome abstract painting using ivory
black oil paint. Murray’s work, immediate
as it is organic, draws its strength from the
reflective qualities inherent within the paint
he uses and the physicality of the visceral
brushstroke left behind. The unadulterated
pigment allows for the texture and movement
of the paint to come through, while the
overall piece evokes Zen sand gardens with
the quiet raking of the paint. His work is
meditative and gestural, yet precise in his
technique: the flat surface expands and
contracts, ripples and pulses, leaving the
viewer with a clear sense of movement.
Murray’s works are exhibited extensively
in galleries across the United States and
internationally, and can be found in various
public collections. He was the recipient of
different awards and artist residences.
Quim Bové is a Catalan artist currently living
and working in Los Angeles, known for
his Symbolic Abstract paintings executed
through his dynamic brush strokes, reflected
across his multiple collections.
Bové has maintained a fascination for the
philosophy of mankind and the Universe.
His works are an expression of the dynamic
universal forces of energy, motion, and
gravity. Done in oil and enamel and coated
with a resin gloss, his paintings offer abstract
interpretations of these concepts. His
restlessness for experimenting with different
techniques brought him to evolve and create
his unique and distinctive style, in what he
calls “My own calligraphy” represented in the
Architecture of the Universe ongoing series.
Bové’s work was influenced by Abstract
and Surrealist compatriot painters such as
Dalí, Miró, Tàpies and the Contemporary
American Abstract movement.
He believes that colour is the most
important element in his paintings, as it
represents the energy of the universal
forces he explores. His works often feature
concentric overlapping circles of loosely
painted bold lines against a background of
saturated colour; such gestures are meant
to illustrate the pull of gravity on forms,
evoking planetary orbit.
A trained calligrapher, Golnaz Fathi has
the ability to skillfully transform known
language into form and composition. Having
discovered calligraphy while studying
graphic design at Tehran’s Azad University,
she later left to train at the Calligraphy
Association of Iran for six years. As a result,
Fathi was the first woman to win an award
for Ketabat, a distinct genre of calligraphy.
She soon tired of the discipline’s rules and
regulations and thus created a new form of
expression in her paintings: an imaginary
language deeply rooted in Persian tradition
while simultaneously hinting at a social
renaissance.
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