Sara Chaar
Born 1986, Sara Chaar is a Lebanese Visual Artist who graduated in 2008 with a BA degree in Audio-visual. In 2009 she decided to dedicate her career path to visual arts. Chaar’s practice and life feed each other. Her works question her own experiences that are in constant change and movement. Working allows Sara to take a moment to visually contextualize what she is drawn to and detach it from reality. Reading her works is like jumping into a rambling stream of consciousness, created with instinctual marks that transfer her impulses and feelings directly onto the canvas. Her creative process is a cumulative cycle of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing, echoing the aftermath stories of torn cities, a narrative rooted in the continual loop of demolition and rebirth. When she undertakes a new work, she accumulates layers of paint and material that she uses as a foundation, which she then scratches through with screwdrivers, cutters and palette knives, instinctively forcing out transformations and translations of her encounters with materials, sounds and matters of life. In her most recent works she uses soft colors like light pink or baby blue in opposition to her aggressive marks or her more abrupt colors like red or black. As far as the eye goes, there always seems to be, endless layers of color piling up on Sara's canvases. These layers for her are fleeting lines of a heated conversation between her and the work; between her and her unconscious.
Sara Chaar’s abstract compositions are highly textured and heavily emotional battlefields of colour, marks and scratches. There is a stark contrast between the softness of the colours utilised and the brutality of the scrapes and scratches scattered all over her canvases. Chaar’s canvases can be compared to the lifecycle of palimpsests; ancient manuscripts made from animal skin on which texts could be scraped off or washed off, allowing for new texts to be written. Indeed, she works with translucent layers of cold wax and oil paint stratified over one another and energetically scratched off with screwdrivers, cutters and palette knives. While every fresh coat of paint adds to the story communicated by the canvas, every scratch either conceals or reveals a part of this narrative. As a result, viewers are confronted with a rich visual world, where traces left by the artist’s interventions give birth to a language of their own. Chaar invites viewers to delve deeper than the surface of the canvases, and to conduct their own semiotic study of the works before them. Chaar’s creative process is a continuous cycle of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing, echoing the evolution of the cities that we live in from creation, to demolition, to rebirth. Much like her hometown Beirut, Chaar’s canvases have all experienced many transformations, each one of which have enhanced them with new layers of depth.
Exhibitions to date
2023 “Continuous” solo exhibition at Marie Jose Gallery (London)
2022 “Liminality” Solo exhibition at Galleri Tom Christoffersen (Copenhagen)
2022 "Mena Art Fair, Middle East & North Africa" Booth B2, with Art on 56th Gallery (Paris)
2022 "Summer Collective" collective exhibition at Art on 56th Gallery (Beirut)
2021 “Wanderings” solo exhibition at CJ. One Gallery (New York)
2021 “Wanderings” solo exhibition at Marie José Honein Art Gallery (London)
2021 “Regeneration” collective exhibition at Art On 56th Art Gallery (Beirut)
2021 “Lumières du Liban” collective exhibition at Institut Du Monde Arabe (Paris)
(Museum acquisition)
2021 “Imagined Certainty” Solo exhibition at Art On 56th (Beirut)
2021 "What remains on the walls" (Beirut) project supported by "Institut Du Monde Arabe"
(Paris)
2021 Collective exhibition at Pop Up Art Gallery -first and second edition (Beirut)
2021 “Furnweh” collective exhibition at Open Gallery (Berlin)
2020 "Come Back" collective exhibition at Art On 56th Art Gallery (Beirut)
2020 "Out of Lebanon" collective exhibition at Tom Christoffersen Art Gallery (Copenha-
gen, Denmark)
2020 Solo Exhibition James Baird Gallery (Canada)
2019-2020 Artist Residency Pouch Cove Foundation (Canada)
2019 "Full Color" KAF Art Gallery (Beirut)
2019 "Little Gestures" KAF Art Gallery (Beirut)
2019 RAW collective exhibition (Beirut)
2019 RAW workshop at KAF Art Gallery (Beirut)
2018 Collective exhibition Lebanese Talents (Beirut)