Abdul Rahman Katanani began a series of monumental weavings inspired by traditional Palestinian embroideries (Tatreez) more than a year before the pivotal events of October 7 2023. This series now contains nine sculptural objects, weavings or embroideries, which, when taken together, trace a deep shift in the internal world of the artist that has closely mirrored external events in the region. These works hover between industrial menace and quite formal painterly abstraction, but with a lightness of touch that is all Katanani.

Become even a little familiar with his works and it will be clear that the lace-like grace that his work inhabits in the face of brutality, hardness, crunching machinery, is absolutely integral to his vision. However hard a material, the industrial origin, barbaric use, Katanani can take this hardness and gift it new life, in an astonishing re-birth that does not take away from materiality, but rather, in his careful manipulation, his handwork, holds up the material as simultaneously resolutely itself and as something quite new, incidentally or not, somehow opposite to its intended use, and more, as full of joy and life.

Abdul Rahman Katanani was born in 1983 in Sabra, Lebanon and lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. He holds a diploma of Fine Arts from the Lebanese University, Institute of Fine-Arts (2007), and a masters of Fine Arts from the same institution, awarded in 2013. Since graduating he has

participated in many solo and group exhibitions in Lebanon and internationally, as well as regularly attending international residency programmes. Selected recent solo exhibitions include Rituals, Gallery Magda Danysz, Paris, France (2021); Self Portrait Total, Gallery Analix Forever, Switzerland (2020); Brainstorm, Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon (2019); Hard Core, Gallery Magda Danysz, Paris, France (2017); Resilience, Gallery Analix Forever, Genève, Switzerland. (2017) and Olive Forest, Anglet Municipality, Biennale d’Anglet, France (2016). His work is held in a number of significant collections including; Accor Hotels, France; Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium; Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Dar El-Nimer, Beirut, Lebanon; Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar and the Philippe Jabre Collection, Lebanon.

Photo : ©Omar Katanani)