EXHIBITIONS
An encounter of colors, moods, and visions, brought together in one vibrant summer dialogue.
A collective exhibition celebrating the freedom of artistic expression, where each work becomes a glimpse of light, warmth, and endless summer.
The work of Yasmina Nysten tends towards the face, portraits that combine large swathes of muted colour with quick swatches of unapologetic brightness. Her sensitivity to contrast plays out also in the wider environs of her paintings, including objects so casually yet carefully placed we cannot but imagine they have some specific meaning, a relation to the face beside them, the body resting, the shifted world the artist creates. Pattern, when used, is dedicated, honours the way the world can catch on a moment, the light can catch, the world becoming for a second all pattern, all flecks and small, shifting subtleties. The world here divides into parts and pattern, more than light, brights and darks. There is a recognisable and an unrecognisable part, a clear brush stroke, a face formed from parts, what else forms a face except reality has no brush, or it is harder to see the strokes. In Nysten’s words these portraits ‘do not speak a language; rather, they teeter on the edge of a message. They offer only their ground: an absolute, silent being-there that confronts us at the very limit of what can be seen’.
In the world-making of Doreen El Zein, apparently peaceful shapes morph easily towards form, but rarely reach a recognisable state. A fluid translucence pervades the whole, unconcerned by shifts in colour and tone, guided rather by changes in temperature, the swaying depths of warmth and cold.
Indeed, in the spaces that she shapes between the forms of fire and water, a contrast begins to emerge, a movement between warm and cool, a heat that burns at the base or the centre, licking the edges of caves and watery hollows
In this way, Zein’s gentle painterly expression is tempered by an intensity of contrast, revealing its depth over time, through looking and allowing spaces to exist inside and around each other, and through this gaining a sense of her process. If her gift is in the continual morphing of form, the unending wonder of what a form might reach, she comes to terms with her peace in the relationship with intensity, the darkness inside the light.
What water quenches those fires, or refuses to let them die, what peace is disturbed by muted, mutable darkness.
Beginning her career in special paint effects and furniture finishing, her work has evolved to include painting and sculpture in mixed media with a focus on paintings developed through densely layered multi-media washes that at times give way to transparent overlapping veils of colour expressing her inner world.
She held her first solo exhibition at Agial Art Gallery in Beirut in 2017 and has participated in various group exhibitions including Visual Art Forum, Unesco Palace (2016); Lebanese American University Fine Arts Alumni Biennale, Beirut, Lebanon (2016); Prolekult, American University of Beirut, Beirut Lebanon, 2016; Vento d Oriente, Venice Italy, 2016; Rebirth of a Nation, Beirut Exhibition Center (2015); International Women’s Day, Haigazian University Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon (2013); Hamazkayin Gallery (2012, 2016); Schizzo gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2014) and Rochane art gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2012). Her work is held in a number of private collections.