Saleh Barakat Gallery

Hiba Kalache Exhibition May / June 2018

Saleh Barakat Gallery would like to invite you to the opening of:

Hiba Kalache Exhibition
Lemonade Everything Was So Infinite

Opening: Friday 11 May, 2018 at 7pm till 30 June, 2018

Venue: Saleh Barakat Gallery, Clemenceau, Justinian Street, Beirut, Lebanon

Hiba Kalache presents works on paper, paintings, a connective body of sculptures, and an installation. She draws in her painting and she writes with her brush. Her gestures are vigorous yet intricate, scribbly à la Twombly. Her practice is one of écriture. To use Roland Barthes’ now-old French neologism, her painting is scriptable: its hermeneutic, symbolic, historic, and semic codes open up to an indeterminacy in the reading of both her work and its own textual references. Grand in scale, layered and ambiguous, it does not reaffirm what is mythologized. There is no singular unity in its composition, no universe that is total or whole. Kalache’s work demands a reception that is both distant and intimate, and in return, it promises jouissance akin, and yet antithetical to divine rapture.

Born in Beirut in 1972, Hiba Kalache is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, drawing, painting, and sculpture. Kalache draws on her daily life for her materials – often extra-artistic – and process. In 2005, Kalache received a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. She has since exhibited in Beirut, Berlin, Brussels, Istanbul, New Orleans, Oakland, San Jose (USA), San Francisco, and Tehran. Her work has also been shown at art fairs including Art Dubai, Drawing Now (Paris), and Gwangju Art (South Korea). Recent group exhibitions include Mimesis Expression Construction (2016) curated by Octavian Esanu at the American University of Beirut’s Rose and Shaheen Saleeby Museum, Heartland (2015) curated by Joanna Chevalier at the Beirut Exhibition Center, and Under Construction, Exposure (2014) curated by Marie Muracciole at the Beirut Art Center. In 2012, she had solo shows in Beirut with The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, and the FFA Private Bank. In 2017, she taught fine arts at the Lebanese American University.