Sky Diary a solo exhibition by Bettina Khoury Badr
Vernissage: 29/08/2024 at 18:00
Exhibition: 28/08/2024 at 10:00 to 03/10/2024 at 18:00
“My home is a little dot on the world map; constant turmoil shapes its identity. From this point, I gaze and contemplate a distant blue surface. Fascinated by its substance and unlimited chroma, I keep registering minute details about it. The work unfolds as a diary and leads me back and forth to the magic and beauty of color manifestations. It also allows me to travel far in space and observe ‘HOME’ as another fragile blue dot in a large cosmic field.
Goethe wrote, ‘Color itself is a degree of darkness.’ I borrowed his color wheel and found all the ingredients needed to build my skies.
The work developed progressively from watercolor studies to a series of grid paintings where small skies light the pictorial space. The pattern is a visual puzzle; each grid has a portion of the picture that is in contrast with or in harmony with pieces next to it, creating a holistic tapestry.
As fragile as a stem, we stand before its immense and miraculous woven pattern.”
“Bettina Badr retains moments of everyday life, as if in a diary, inscribing the changing moods of landscapes on small-scale papers using water-based mediums. She transposes these diary entries into large compositions, creating visions in organic and geometric shapes. The circles and squares she persistently uses echo the ancient symbols of the spherical heavens and the solidity and materiality of earth. These complex abstractions transform the landscapes into subtle interplays of colors and forms.
Set in relation to one another, the landscapes begin to frame each other, making each piece interact with the next as, simultaneously, content, frame, and outside world, in an open-ended permutation. The landscapes become constellations inviting viewers to explore an infinite vision of our world that transcends confined perceptions. ‘Observe day and night simultaneously,’ ‘reverse ground and sky,’ ‘look at earth from the moon,’ urges the artist, making each work an open frame through which reality is re-invented.” – Zena Meskaoui
BIO
Born in Beirut in 1971, Bettina Khoury Badr’s work confronts the abstract with the representational, the gestural with the still. Her work draws inspiration from Lebanon, her place of birth, and the events that are part of the recent shattered past. She delves into memory and depicts fragments of reality.
In 2001, she received her Diplôme d’études supérieures in Fine Arts and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts in 2012 from the Lebanese University. The intervening years were spent in teaching and developing her artistic vision.
She held solo exhibits at Kromatik Art Gallery in 2012 and Art on 56th gallery in 2018. Badr’s work was featured in 2015 in “Mark on the Wall” in conjunction with the Virginia Woolf conference at Bloomsburg University, and in the “Salon d’Automne” at Sursock Museum in 2018, 2016, and 2012. More recently, she exhibited in the “Togetherness” Collective at Galerie Tanit and in the 2022 Collective “How Will It End?” presented by the Boghossian Foundation, organized with the Centre Pompidou.
Since 2010, she has been teaching at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, where she is a regular participant in exhibitions such as “State of Things” in 2022.
