Hanibal Srouji "Cages"
June Kelly Gallery
This event has ended.
An exhibition of recent paintings by Lebanese artist Hanibal Srouji hauntingly colorful abstract works that are the artist visceral response to the horrific brutalities he has encountered in his life, including a bloody civil war in Lebanon and the attack on the World Trade Center.
Entitled Cages, Srouji canvases manifest the violence that he saw in Beirut as a child and went through vicariously at the World Trade Center, where he had worked at the Triangle Art Workshop. He often marks his paintings with fire, sometimes burning a hole in the canvas and surrounding it with pink or light blue flower petals. The flowers, he says, are a celebration of freedom, their fragile petals symbolizing the delicate nature of our lives, but also the beauty we occasionally encounter.
His canvases are square, about 28 inches on a side, and are typically arranged as horizontal diptychs, in changeable combinations. In some presentations, a canvas may be turned on its side or upside down.
In this exhibition, the works relate primarily to pain and suffering inflicted by violence, as exemplified by the World Trade Center attack. In one painting, a tower stands with its lower half of red and white stripes, its top half afire.
In another, a black tower is on the right, strong but vulnerable. In yet a third, there is an orange column on the right, apparently sturdy, but with flames bursting from its middle floors.
Srouji was born in Beirut in 1957 to a family with Christian, French and Arab roots. They all fled the civil war in 1976 and landed in Montreal, where he went to college. In 1989, he moved to Paris and has an apartment and a studio there. With glimmers of hope rising in Lebanon and violence subsiding, he has recently returned to Beirut and is living there, as well as in Paris. He is also teaching at the Lebanese American University.
Media
Schedule
from October 07, 2011 to November 15, 2011