Date: Wednesday 24 May 2023

Hour: 4:00 pm 

Place:  Saleh Barakat Gallery

Language : English, french and arabic

Duration: 1h00

Registration: (78) 959670 ; news@agendaculturel.com

The visit is free of charge - Booking is required.

Number of participants is limited.

The tour will be guided by Shawki Youssef

Peeled paper and pulled fabric, Youssef’s work is a labour to expose and un-master color and medium while bringing psychic traces and images to the fore. The works call for a procession beginning with Youssef’s collaboration with Jack Dabaghian. Photographic plates depicting sublime trees stand as their own ghostly apparitions, while their prints, stained by Koranic verses, are once again reified. From trees that transform into phantasmatic images to stains that conjure an entire landscape, Youssef’s works stand as procedures that penetrate the no-man’s-land of the trace, the layer, the fold and the stain. 

Peeling through the surfaces of his works in a hallucinatory succession, Youssef’s constructions unveil a new sublime in exploiting the painterly mark, the texture as creased skins revealing the infinitude of the limits of materials.

About the artist

Shawki Youssef was born in Beirut in 1973. He received his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Lebanese University in 1994 before going on to complete a Master’s in science in 2007 at Saint Joseph University in Lebanon. Youssef’s work extends across multiple mediums to include painting, drawing, video, and installations. He has exhibited his works in numerous institutions including Al Markhiya Gallery, Doha; Green Art Gallery, Dubai, the Institut Du Monde Arabe, Paris; Beirut Exhibition Center, Beirut; Agial Art Gallery; and Green Art Gallery. His work can be found in the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, and in the Salsali Private Museum, Dubai. He lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.

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Les visites guidées de l’Agenda Culturel sont organisées avec le support de Artscoops