Flesh Flowers assembles the work of over seventy artists and more than two hundred pieces from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection. Borrowing its title from one of Miriam Cahn’s works in the collection, the exhibition delves into the complex intersections of bodies and paint, with a particular focus on the work of women artists in the collection.
This show marks the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of the Aïshti Foundation exhibition space in Beirut, and it is the first major presentation since the Foundation’s programs were interrupted by the recent war.
The works in the exhibition combine abstraction and figuration to complicate relationships between form and content, medium and meaning, subjectivity and otherness. In an era saturated with digital images and disembodied data, these artists simultaneously reassert and question the physical materiality of painting. Each artist approaches the canvas as a site of intense negotiation: between the raw immediacy of the gestural mark and the emergence of recognizable forms; between the tangible presence of the body and its fractured representation in a hyper-mediated society. Screens, pixels, vectors, and networks intersect with anatomies, stains, traces, and fluids in an intense conflation of the carnal with the digital. Abstraction gives way to fleeting suggestions of flesh, or conversely, figurative elements dissolve into fields of pure color, texture, and information.