EXHIBITIONS
Lebanese painter and classical musician Ribal Molaeb is primarily concerned with the play of air and light, his painterly attention caught by a deep observation of the sky, viewed directly from the vast panoramas that surround his home and studio in the mountains of Lebanon, the village of Baissour. Perched high on what feels like a summit, his vision is taken by the vastness of the sky, a rhythmical composition in which he seeks to describe aspects of his highly attuned aural and visual landscapes.
Molaeb’s paintings are images of movement, observations of the changing sky as it shifts from day to night, unhurried from season to season. Sweeping across the canvas, his brushstrokes at times apparent, the paint is hurried and yet delicate, capturing what is before him with the vastness of nature translated to the large scale that he has chosen.These skies are groundless, appear that way, and yet there is almost always a darker aspect towards the ground of his canvases, a reminder of earth, edge, even as it is clear this this element too is rolling, transforming with the light. Sound emerges, the memory of music grounded in a particular tradition, the complex formality, rhythmic and undulating crescendos and decrescendos of the classical form.
Ribal is a prolific worker, creating sweeping strokes of colour across large canvases depicting the sky as it shifts from light to dark and the depth of colour that he observes between. Yet, if observing the sky is his painterly passion then Ribal has another that is perhaps of equal importance. A professional musician, he has spoken of the way in which his musical interest has profoundly shaped his artistic vision, noting that his artistic focus ‘lies in the interplay and equilibrium of lines, forms, and colour gradations’, a trait that he considers influenced by his background in classical music.
The paintings of Ribal are paintings of light, but more than this they are paintings of internal space, a limitless psychological landscape that speaks to sound as well as to vision. The pace of the paintings is rhythmical, an ordered series of spaces that speak of a fluid yet ultimately tethered relationship to place and world.
Since early childhood, he had worked as an assistant to his father, the acclaimed artist Jamil Molaeb. In 2015, he founded the Molaeb Festival for Chamber Music and Fine Arts. Ribal’s paintings have been exhibited with prominent galleries and institutions in cities including New York, Tokyo, Fukuoka, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Amman, Beirut, London, Paris, Antibes, Madrid, Amsterdam, Geneva, Basel, and Zürich. Recent solo exhibitions include Artifact (New York, 2025), Mizoe Art Gallery (Fukuoka, 2025), Mizoe Art Gallery (Tokyo, 2025), Galerie Esther Woerdehoff (Geneva, 2022), and Galerie Claude Lemand (Paris, 2021). Among his participations in international art fairs, he presented a solo exhibition at Volta Basel Art Fair (2024) and Zürich Art Fair (2024), and was featured at Art Paris (2022), Contemporary Istanbul (2025), and Art Fair Asia Fukuoka (2025).
A painting by Ribal has been acquired by the Museum of Arab Art in Paris (IMA).
Currently living and working in Zürich, Switzerland, Ribal is represented by Saleh Barakat Gallery in Lebanon and Mizoe Art Gallery in Japan.
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.