Saleh Barakat Gallery invites you to the opening of Shawki Youssef’s exhibition “Five Sides But One Entrance" on Thursday, 4 May 2023 5:00-8:00pm, this exhibition features a collaboration with Jack Dabaghian at The Upper Gallery.

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.  

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. 

Jack Dabaghian was born in Beirut in 1961. He is a an artist, photographer and has worked within numerous photographic practices including as a reporter and has served as Reuters Middle East’s Chief Photographer and Fashion Photographer. Dabaghian has dedicated his practice to the image for 38 years publishing his work in The Economist, The New York Times, Time Magazine, amongst numerous others.