Agial Art Gallery would like to invite you to the opening of:
Fadia Haddad - Face to Face
Chorégraphie fiévreuse.
Cheminer, fouiller, détourner, reculer, avancer, continuer,
Baisser la tête dans la figure.
Trouver l'intuition pure.
Fadia Haddad
Fadia Haddad has followed a process-based approach to painting since the late 80s. Her vast corpus of action paintings has revolved around the enigmatic motif of the mask. In the earlier years of her practice, the mask occupied a prominent position in her painting, but has gradually receded into a nearly inconspicuous pencil drawing. Even when it was the central figure of the work, the mask did not hold a representational status. It was and continues to be treated as a fetish object which now bears little relation to its primitivist progenitors.
Haddad does not take a particular place to be the quintessence of semblances. She locates the universal in the mask. The mask summons the contradictory forces of denial and avowal: it is an empty object whose presence is denied by its beholder, but it also carries the material trace of Haddad’s bodily movements, registered in brushstrokes. It at once disappears and returns. The viewer is lured by its double nature, expects to be deceived, and yet engages in its ritual enjoyment.
Fadia Haddad was born in Lebanon in 1959. She graduated from the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA) in 1984 and obtained a diploma in Fine Arts from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA) in Paris in 1988. Haddad has had numerous solo exhibitions in Beirut, Brussels, London, Miami, and Paris. She has also notably participated in group exhibitions at the Institut du Monde Arabe (1991, 2008), and Foundation Paul Ricard (1995). She lives and works in Paris.
Opening: Tuesday 3 October 2017 at 6:00 pm (until 28 October 2017)
Venue: Agial Art Gallery, 63 Abdel Aziz St., Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon.