Azza Abo Rabieh is a Syrian artist living in Beirut. Her work, sensitive and sensuous, moves with dexterity between painting, drawing and printmaking, her subtle shapes and lines developing in a seamless eroticism between technique and form.
Her work inhabits this world in a state of lightness, almost play, almost delicate, almost crude. In her exacting surfaces there is a truth to experience, to hope, to what could be if only we would see, feel, perhaps abandon ourselves to depth.
Layers upon layers of closely woven tulle or net are arranged carefully yet definitely on surfaces, creating precise and delicate counterpoints to line, a sensitive depth of colour to match their strength. Without knowing we know that the layers are many, the depth is clear. Depth again, lightness again.
Lightness meets depth, dives to the deeps of the sea and finds yet a lightness there, a joy, eroticism, that is exactly as it is, as it feels to be in the lightness and depths of great passion, of sex, of love. The lightness is that of becoming one, the depth of the experience, touch. The simple and joyful confusion of bodies, hearts, minds.
Azza Abo Rebieh (Syria, b.1980) obtained her degree in printmaking from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Damascus University in 2002. Initially interested in etching and engraving, she has extended her work to encompass an array of media and materials, including watercolor, thread and tulle on canvas, ink painting, and printing on leather.
Abo Rebieh held her first solo exhibitions in 2018 and 2019 at 392 Rmeil (Beirut, Lebanon) managed and curated by Nelsy Massoud, and in 2022 she held her solo exhibition, ‘Yearning’ at Saleh Barakat Gallery. In 2024 she held a solo exhibition and performance titled ‘111’ at Majaz gallery (Beirut, Lebanon). She has participated in more than fifteen group exhibitions and has been the recipient of three awards for artistic work including First prize in the Damascus Annual Youth Exhibition (2006). Abo Rebieh’s work is held in a number of notable collections including the British Museum (London), Musee de l’institute du Monde Arabe (Paris), Dalloul Foundation (Lebanon), Atassi Foundation (Syria) and the Ostrobothnian Museum Vaasa (Finland).
The work of French-Lebanese artist Gabrielle Bejani is dream-like, yet somehow defined, deliberate. Although in a state of continual flux, her vibrant paper landscapes are imbued with a kind of undulating geometry, a certain regularity coming up against more organic surfaces shaped by ceaselessly shifting edges, colours, textures, lines, and a cast of characters with a resonance both highly personal and yet recognisable to the viewer. Myriad shades of muted and jewel-like blues, reds and browns, colour rich landscapes of sky-like space, while half-remembered narratives take shape among them.
The haunting presence that proliferates her work is grounded in materiality, the delicate tearing, cutting and arranging of pieces as much a part of the whole as the mushrooming forms and scenographies that dance with fluidity across her compositions. Bejani’s created world gives a feeling of rhythmic, almost metronomic movement, in an environment too large, almost sublime, in its awe-inspiring scale. Her figures, when they appear, perhaps on a boat, or simply curled around themselves, are tiny yet distinct against vast backdrops, almost, but not quite swallowed by the places in which they find themselves.
Here is a stamp of Lebanon, gently placed, tiny among a vast night sky peppered with stars. Her stamps, like her figures, seem to mark the scene with a scale incommensurate with their surroundings; such a small and mobile mark in all that wide, endless space. A deliberate gesture, such lightness and such weight.
Gabrielle Bejani was born in Paris, France in 1995. She is a French Lebanese artist currently based in London. In 2018 she received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London and in 2023 completed her MFA at Slade School of Fine Art (London). Since graduating she has participated in numerous exhibitions in London, Paris, New York and across Europe.
