- 10:30
To paint as naturally as one breathes, to explore color as one delves into memory: Irène Ghanem, a luminous and defiant figure on the Lebanese art scene, presents “Entre Terre et Mer” (Between Land and Sea) today in Beirut, a highly anticipated opening at Mark Hachem Gallery. The exhibition, on view until October 20, reveals wonders, wounds and light.
In the vibrant arena of contemporary Lebanese painting, few artists carry color as both a sharp wound and an act of faith. Born in Beirut in 1970, Irène Ghanem embodies a generation that has seen light emerge from chaos, enduring war, exile and then rebirth, never losing sight of the need to invent a personal visual language. Just hours before her exhibition at Mark Hachem on Tuesday, October 7, the artist opens up, palette in hand, about a journey as intense as it is luminous, where each canvas becomes a memory of the world.
From childhood, color asserted itself as an obvious truth in her life, an intimate language to express what the roar of bombs could not silence. “For me, color is not decoration: it is a language, a breath, a way to survive,” she confides. In the late 1980s, she began her formal training at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), but life, true to its irony, upended her path: at 20, a rocket interrupted her trajectory, bringing surgery, rehabilitation, pain, but also awakening. This trauma would shape all of her work, turning painting into an absolute necessity. “I realized that life could change in an instant; so I chose color.” From that moment on, the canvas became a field for experimentation, a laboratory of light and emotion.
In the early 1990s, Ghanem left a wounded Lebanon for France, driven by a thirst for learning and the desire to broaden her horizons. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later in Marly-le-Roi, she refined her line, discovered the spontaneity of drawing, the vitality of the body and the pleasure of free gesture. Paris nourished her, but soon Los Angeles called. There, the Californian space and light, the freedom of gesture, and the influence of Willem de Kooning infused her work. In her studio, she learned to listen to color, to let it surprise her, sometimes even surpass her: “I paint from feeling, not observation.”
Back in Lebanon
In 1997, Ghanem returned to Beirut, brimming with renewed energy and a thirst for sharing. Between 2002 and 2006, she exhibited locally at UNESCO and Daraj al-Fan, and internationally in Canada and at the Créateur Français Gallery in France. Her canvases quickly drew attention for their intensity, a constant interplay between density and transparency, where the material seems to breathe, oscillating between abstraction and landscape. But Irène is not only a painter; she is also a mother. At the dawn of her career, she chose to pause her creative impulse to care for her children – Noelle, Diane and Boutros – finding in this hiatus an unexpected source of creativity. “I would draw during their naps,” she recalls, referring to the watercolor sketchbooks tucked in between daily tasks.
In 2014, she opened her own studio in Beirut and made a strong return to the art scene with a sold-out exhibition, organized in partnership with the German Cultural Center. The following years brought recognition: the Paul Guiragossian Museum, Beirut Art Fair, the Italian and Spanish Embassies, the Charles Corm Foundation, and more. Her painting, rooted in lyrical abstraction, channels the great names of expressionism – Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Kandinsky, Joan Mitchell – yet always with a Mediterranean warmth. Earth, sea, air and light merge into vibrant fields, bathed in blues, ochres, pinks and gold.
Painting Between Two Worlds
In this exhibition, Ghanem offers a series of canvases infused with sea, light and movement. It is a visual journey that constantly shifts between grounding and drift, stillness and surge, density and flow. “Each painting becomes a shifting threshold, a suspended breath between what holds and what escapes,” she says. For her, color follows no fixed plan: “It lives, it breathes, it remembers.”
Inspiration struck at the House of the Seas in Vienna, before the vast aquariums that captivated Irène Ghanem during a trip – living canvases in their own right. Enchanted by the silent choreography of the fish, their shifting colors and their sudden disappearances into the infinite blue, she admits, “The fish became my muses.” Yet the aquarium was, in truth, only a pretext. “I wanted to bring the sea into my garden, to let the mystery of water and life flow into my daily world.” In this way, the sea flows through memory and glass to settle at the heart of her home, slipping its familiar strangeness onto the canvas.
One begins to understand what she seeks to awaken in the viewer: “A sense of wonder, above all wonder. Perhaps joy, but not necessarily. And after wonder, I would say curiosity.”
These are the emotions that await anyone who pauses before her work, captivated by a vibration and an irresistible urge to peek behind the curtain of forms.
For her, painting is a dialogue with the memory of the world and a confrontation with the artist’s humility before nature. When asked what one of her canvases might feel if left on a Lebanese beach, she replies without hesitation: “I think it would turn red, perhaps, with jealousy… Because it would see that nature, our Creator Father, has already invented everything.”
This honesty runs through her palette. Blue returns again and again, almost obsessively: “I am crazy about blue,” she says. Yet it is green that remains the ultimate challenge, the untamable color, admired but never matched. “True color is unbeatable… you see it everywhere, you can never equal nature.” For the painter, color is never a given; it is a struggle, a constantly renewed experience.
‘Painting with God’
When asked about the ideal companion for a day of painting, the artist gives a bold, almost mischievous answer: “God. He is the supreme creator.” Neither De Kooning, nor Shafic Abboud, nor any of the canonical figures of modern art, only the original creator, the one who “invented everything,” could satisfy Irène’s insatiable curiosity. This humility before the vastness permeates her entire approach.
Beneath the light of her canvases, the memory of a wounded Lebanon surfaces. Color becomes both balm and testimony. Ghanem paints the fragile beauty of a country in ruins, the persistence of life and the obstinate resilience of light. Like her spiritual mentors, Shafic Abboud and Yvette Achkar, she works the material to reveal the world’s breath: “They taught me that painting is breathing.”
In her painting, chaos becomes form, emotion becomes language. The layering of pigments, the transparency of blues, the density of ochres, all serve as reminders that color carries the history, the wounds and the rebirths of a country always walking a tightrope.
A Visit to Mark Hachem Gallery
Today, Tuesday, October 7, Irène Ghanem unveils her new works at Mark Hachem Gallery in Beirut. “Entre Terre et Mer” is an invitation to step across the threshold, to explore the in-between-space between here and elsewhere, between memory and promise. The exhibition remains on view at the gallery until October 20.
Ghanem belongs to a generation of artists who transform trauma into material and color into a universal language. Her painting is neither Eastern nor Western; it is suffused with light, wind and memory. A song between land, sea and the lush garden — both inner and outer — that she tends with the same care she extends to those around her.
And finally, why not allow ourselves a slight detour, away from canvases and watercolors? Those who know Irène well understand: she is also the queen of flower arrangements, compositions offered in real life, generous, overflowing, assembled with a gift for giving and a delicacy that amazes as much as her artworks. In her arrangements, you find the same sense of abundance, of light and of the flow of attention. Perhaps there is no equivalent to the beauty of her bouquets, except in the generosity that radiates, tirelessly, across her canvases and her life.
Not to be missed: “Entre Terre et Mer,” Irène Ghanem’s exhibition, on view at Mark Hachem Gallery until October 20.
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