As part of the "From Beirut Art + Design scene" sale, PIASA presents on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 6 pm several emblematic artists of the Lebanese contemporary creation, among which Hiba Kalache.
Born in Beirut in 1972, Hiba Kalache left Lebanon with her parents in 1989 to settle in Canada. After a first training at the Montreal School of Fine Arts and a second at the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, the young woman returned to her native country in 2008. Hiba Kalache's work is inherently multidisciplinary. She distinguishes herself notably in the practice of drawing, sculpture, but also painting and installation.
Rare, even iconoclastic, the materials she uses in her creative process come sometimes from her daily life (food materials, such as butter, spices, rice or even stuffed animals). Enriched by very diverse influences, her artistic production raises the question of the distinction between the private and public spheres. Moreover, the links between image and text constitute one of the starting points of her aesthetic reflections.
Through pastel tones, natural pigments and oil colors, the artist also gravitates around her traumatic memory of Beirut, reminiscences of her childhood under the war and her wanderings in areas partitioned by the fighting. Violence is present without being shown. As a sign of the reflection that surrounds his work, the artist draws enormously from a repertoire that is as much literary as it is philosophical and calls upon the legacy of the French semiologist Roland Barthes.
"The sacred monster died", the piece presented in the selection "From Beirut Art + Design scene" on Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 6 pm, was realized in 2018. On a light background, pastel-colored shapes unfold in the space.
They constitute an aesthetic testimony of the gesturality of the artist at work. This year Hiba Kalache is the object of a first solo exhibition at the Beirut gallery Saleh Barakat. In 2015, she was part of the "Heartland" exhibition at the Beirut Exhibition Center organized by curator Joanna Chevalier.
Since then, the artist has presented her work not only in Beirut but also in Berlin, Istanbul, San Francisco and Tehran.
