From August 29, 2024 to October 3, 2024

Galerie Tanit, Mar Mikhael, Beirut, Lebanon

Bettina Khoury Badr, Sky Diary, Exhibition View

"She transposes these diary entries into large compositions, creating visions in organic and geometric shapes."

Bettina Badr retains moments of everyday life, as if in a diary, inscribing the changing moods of landscapes on small-scale papers using water-based mediums. She transposes these diary entries into large compositions, creating visions in organic and geometric shapes. The circles and squares, she persistently uses, echo the ancient symbols of the spherical heavens and the solidity and materiality of earth. These complex abstractions transform the landscapes into subtle interplays of colors and forms.

Set in relation to one another, the landscapes begin to frame each other, making each piece interact with the next as, simultaneously content, frame, and outside world, in an open-ended permutation. The landscapes become constellations inviting viewers to explore an infinite vision of our world that transcends confined perceptions. “Observe day and night simultaneously,” “reverse ground and sky,” “look at earth from the moon” urges the artist, making each work an open frame through which reality is re-invented.

Zena Meskaoui

BETTINA KHOURY BADR

Born in Beirut in 1971, Bettina Khoury Badr’s work confronts the abstract with the representational, the gestural with the still..

Her work draws inspiration from Lebanon, her place of birth, and the events that are part of the recent shattered past. She delves into memory and depicts fragments of reality.

In 2001, she received her Diplôme d’études supérieures in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 2012 from the Lebanese University. The intervening years were spent in teaching and developing her artistic vision.

She held solo exhibits at Kromatik Art Gallery in 2012 and Art on 56th gallery in 2018. Badr’s work was featured in 2015 in “Mark on the Wall” in conjunction with the Virginia Woolf conference at Bloomsburg University, and in the “Salon d’Automne” Sursock Museum in 2018, 2016, 2012. More recently she exhibited in the “Togetherness” Collective at Galerie Tanit and in the 2022 Collective “How will It End?” presented by the Boghossian Foundation, organized with the Centre Pompidou.

Since 2010, she has been teaching at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, where she is a regular participant in exhibitions such as “State of Things” in 2022.

Artists

Bettina Khoury Badr