Joseph El Hourany is an artist playing with constraint, an architect and sculptor fascinated by limit, in awe of the accident. Hourany’s sculptures seek a moment in which intellect becomes poetry, creating a happy accident of forms, a kind of anti-gravity, a way to float in the voids. His mission is to colour with forms, to colour in the wood, to shade and tone. His mission is to accept tonalities, shade, to adapt, living.

From the Beqaa, a place he describes as a vast plain and horizon where protrusions emerge cleanly from the land, he senses this flat land with its visible disruptions at the root of his sculpture.

Placing the contradictions of his life into his art, Hourany allows intellect to come up against the poetic, an initial design to come up against the individual grain and tone of a particular piece of wood. Courting the experience of not exactly knowing what will happen, the feeling of liberation that this unknowing brings, yet Hourany enters this ambiguity through commitment to technique, both in his preparatory drawings, and then in his hand tooling of wood. He prepares with precise technique, then releases poetry through respect for the material.

Joseph El-Hourany is an architect (M.Arch 1999) and urban planner (MS 2005) who lives and works in Lebanon. From 2006 till 2010, he conducted a doctoral research about the parametric architectural principles in the age of cybernetics. Since 1999, Joseph is working on several architectural and urban planning projects in Lebanon and abroad; besides, he is teaching and lecturing in different research institutes and universities. He published “the Future Of The Past” with John Carswell in 2003, “Specimen Zero” in 2010, “Specimen One” in 2011, “Guvder” in 2012 and “Henri Edde architecte moderne” in 2019. He participated at “Aley International Symposium” of sculpture (1999), and exhibited his “mind maps” drawings at LA CENTRALE (2007, 2008 -Montreal), UQAM (2008 – Montreal), ALBA (2011 – Beirut) and his sculptures at Saleh Barakat Gallery (2021 – Beirut), IMA (2021 – Paris), Abu Dhabi Art Fair (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 – UAE), Art Dubai (2012, 2022, 2023, 2024), MENART (2021,2022 – Paris) and MENART (2022 – Brussels). In 2023, he was elected as president of the “Arab Architects Organization”.

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From Tuesday-Friday 11:00am-6:00pm,

Saturdays 11:am-2:00pm