Lebanese artist Irène Ghanem is presenting her highly anticipated exhibition "Between Land and Sea" at the Mark Hachem Gallery in Beirut, running through October 20. The exhibition showcases the work of an artist who paints as naturally as she breathes, exploring color as one might excavate memory, revealing wonders, wounds, and light through her vibrant canvases.
Born in Beirut in 1970, Ghanem represents a generation that witnessed light emerging from chaos, traversing war, exile, and renaissance without ever losing sight of the necessity to invent her own artistic language. In the colorful arena of contemporary Lebanese painting, few artists carry color like both a living wound and an act of faith. "For me, color is not an ornament: it is a language, a breath, a way to survive," she confides.
Ghanem's artistic journey began at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in the late 1980s, but life dramatically altered her path when she was just twenty years old. A rocket interrupted her trajectory, requiring surgery, rehabilitation, and enduring pain, but also awakening something profound within her. This trauma would mark all her subsequent creation, transforming painting into an absolute necessity. "I understood that life could shift at any moment; so I chose color," she explains.
In the early 1990s, Ghanem left war-torn Lebanon for France, driven by a thirst to learn and broaden her horizons. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and later in Marly-le-Roi, she refined her technique, discovering the spontaneity of drawing, the vitality of the human form, and the pleasure of free gesture. While Paris nourished her artistic development, it was Los Angeles that ultimately called to her. There, the space and light of California, the freedom of gesture, and the influence of Willem de Kooning infused her work with new energy.
In her California studio, Ghanem learned to listen to color, to let it surprise her, sometimes even surpass her expectations. "I paint from sensation, not from observation," she describes her approach. This philosophy would become central to her artistic practice, allowing her to create works that breathe and oscillate between abstraction and landscape.
Ghanem returned to Beirut in 1997, charged with new energy and a desire to share her artistic vision. Between 2002 and 2006, she exhibited at UNESCO, Daraj el-Fan, venues in Canada, and the French gallery Le Créateur. Her canvases quickly struck viewers with their intensity, displaying a constant interplay between density and transparency, where matter seems to breathe.
However, Ghanem is not only a painter but also a mother. At the dawn of her career, she chose to suspend her artistic momentum to accompany her children – Noëlle, Diane, and Boutros – finding in this retreat an unexpected source of creativity. "I drew during their naps," she recalls, referring to the watercolor notebooks she filled between daily tasks.
In 2014, Ghanem opened her own studio in Beirut (Atelier Irène Ghanem) and returned forcefully to the artistic scene with a sold-out exhibition organized in partnership with the German Cultural Center. The following years brought recognition: exhibitions at the Paul Guiragossian Museum, Beirut Art Fair, the Italian and Spanish Embassies, and the Charles Corm Foundation.
Her painting, rooted in lyrical abstraction, evokes the great names of expressionism – Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Kandinsky, Joan Mitchell – but always with a Mediterranean warmth. Earth, sea, air, and light merge in vibrant fields bathed in blue, ochre, rose, and gold.
The current exhibition offers viewers a series of canvases inhabited by the sea, light, and movement – a pictorial journey that constantly oscillates between anchorage and drift, stability and wave, density and fluidity. "Each canvas becomes a moving boundary, a suspended breath between what holds and what escapes," she explains. For the painter, color obeys no fixed composition: "It lives, breathes, remembers."
Inspiration for this series struck at the House of the Seas in Vienna, where Ghanem was captivated by immense aquariums – true living canvases – during a visit. Fascinated by the silent choreography of fish, their changing colors, their sudden disappearances into the infinite blue, she admits: "The fish became my muses." But the aquarium was, ultimately, just a pretext: "I wanted to bring the sea to my garden, to bring the mystery of water and living things into my daily universe."
When asked what she hopes to provoke in visitors, Ghanem responds: "Wonder, above all wonder. Perhaps joy, but not necessarily. But after wonder, I would say curiosity." These emotions await those who stop before her works, seized by a vibration and a wild desire to look behind the curtain of forms.
For Ghanem, painting means dialoguing with the memory of the world and confronting the artist's humility before nature. When asked what one of her canvases might think if lost on a Lebanese beach, she answers without hesitation: "I think it would turn red, perhaps, with jealousy... Because it would see that nature, our Creator Father, has already invented everything."
This sincerity permeates her palette: while blue returns obsessively – "I am mad about blue" – it is green that remains the supreme challenge, the indomitable color that cannot be equaled. "True green color is unbeatable, we cannot equal nature," she observes.
When asked about her ideal companion for a day of painting, Ghanem offers a radical response, both playful and mystical: "I prefer to have God. He is the supreme creator." Neither de Kooning, nor Chafic Abboud, nor any of the tutelary figures of modern art could satisfy Irène's insatiable curiosity – only the original creator who invented everything.
Under the light of her canvases, the memory of wounded Lebanon surfaces. Color becomes both balm and testimony. Ghanem paints the fragile beauty of a country in ruins, the persistence of life, the obstinate resistance of light. Like her spiritual masters, Chafic Abboud and Yvette Achkar, she excavates matter to bring forth the world's breathing: "They taught me that painting is breathing."
"Between Land and Sea" represents an invitation to cross the threshold, to explore the limbo between here and elsewhere, between memory and promise. The exhibition continues at Mark Hachem Gallery through October 20, showcasing an artist who belongs to a generation that transforms trauma into material and color into universal language. Her painting is neither Eastern nor Western – it is traversed by lights, winds, and memories, a song between earth, sea, and the luxuriant garden she cultivates with the same attention she gives to those around her.
