Artist Sacha Abou Khalil

Agial Gallery - January February 2018

Sacha Abou Khalil
Breaking the Frozen Seas

Sacha Abou Khalil has two strands of the painting: hyperrealist portraits of individuals or families which he produces by the commission, and expressionist portraits drawn from the fictive worlds of canonical novels such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Yasunari Kawabata’s The House of Sleeping Beauties. For the former, Abou Khalil maintains the necessary distance to portray a world he is observing and staging in the genre of portraiture. For the latter, he employs himself, family members, and recognizable actors for models. By turning himself and them into the protagonists, he unambiguously inscribes a personal, as well as local, relevance to these texts.

Sacha Abou Khalil was born in Serbia in 1964 and raised in Mount Lebanon. He received his Baccalaureate in Lebanon in 1982, and entered the Strasbourg School of Medicine in 1983. He graduated in 1990 as a state doctor in dental surgery, and until 2011 ran his own private practice in France. In 2011, he quit dentistry. He now lives in Italy and Lebanon as a self-taught painter.

Opening: Tuesday 9 January 2018 at 6:00 pm (till 3 February 2018)

Venue: Agial Art Gallery, 63 Abdel Aziz St., Hamra, Beirut, Lebanon.
T: +961 1 345213