An Article by C.J. (832 words, 4 min. read)
In the heart of Gemmayzeh, where art and resilience intertwine, Art on 56th celebrates thirteen luminous years of dedication to contemporary art with a new collective exhibition titled Landscape Conversations. Curated by Noha Wadi Moharram, the gallery’s founder and guiding spirit, this exhibition reflects both continuity and transformation, a visual symphony of six artists united by one profound theme: the landscape.
For over a decade, Moharram has cultivated a space where creativity breathes freely, where established and emerging artists find a voice, and where Beirut’s cultural pulse reverberates across continents. Through Landscape Conversations, she brings together six distinct sensibilities: Wissam Beydoun, Mansour El Habre, Layla Dagher, Imad Fakhry, Ghada Jamal, and Edgard Mazigi, each reimagining the natural world through abstraction, emotion, and form. The exhibition unfolds as a dialogue between earth and sky, memory and invention, presence and possibility.
Wissam Beydoun, The Harmony of Abstraction
In Wissam Beydoun’s Experimental Landscapes, nature is translated into rhythm and geometry. His watercolor and pencil compositions reveal a delicate equilibrium between structure and transparency. Mountains, skies, and valleys dissolve into ethereal layers of color, each hue breathing with quiet intention. Beydoun’s vision is meditative, guided by the belief that all forms originate from one universal shape. His art does not merely depict nature; it unveils its essence. It is a spiritual architecture that connects the visible with the unseen.
Mansour El Habre, The Energy of Gesture
With Mansour El Habre, the landscape becomes a field of vibrant tension and expressive power. His mixed-media works are alive with motion, their brushstrokes charged with the pulse of intuition. Greens, yellows, and blues collide in dynamic harmony, capturing both the beauty and the restlessness of existence. Each canvas becomes a living surface, layered, tactile, and free, where emotion and energy coalesce. El Habre paints as if he is sculpting light, transforming landscape into pure sensation.
Layla Dagher, The Poetry of Layers
Layla Dagher transforms landscape into tapestry. Through kraft paper collage, acrylic, and embroidery, she constructs terrains of memory and belonging. In works such as The Space Between, textured surfaces evoke the geography of both land and emotion. Her stitches act as pathways, linking fragments of paper and color into quiet unity. Dagher’s art carries the soul of Lebanon’s terrain; its warmth, fragility, and perseverance. Each piece feels like a page from a visual diary, where the land itself becomes language.
Imad Fakhry, The Silence of Light
Imad Fakhry’s paintings are meditations on atmosphere and time. In Where the Light Fades, the horizon emerges softly, bathed in tones of ochre, grey, and umber. His compositions balance precision with poetry, inviting reflection rather than depiction. Fakhry captures the stillness that lingers between day and night, the fragile instant when light surrenders to silence. His art is contemplative, offering the viewer not a place but a pause, not a view but a feeling.
Ghada Jamal, Memory as Landscape
For Ghada Jamal, the landscape holds the traces of history and the weight of remembrance. Her Untitled works, painted in oil on cardboard, carry a tactile intimacy. The textures recall worn surfaces and the passing of time, while her colors — warm, muted, and deeply felt — speak of endurance and grace. Jamal’s landscapes do not imitate nature; they embrace it. Through her brush, memory becomes terrain, and the landscape turns into a vessel for emotion, reflection, and belonging.
Edgard Mazigi, Invented Horizons
Edgard Mazigi redefines the landscape as an act of imagination. In his Invented Landscape series, layers of acrylic unfold like dreamscapes, neither entirely real nor entirely abstract. His palette, luminous and bold, invites the eye to wander between shadow and light. Mazigi paints with architectural precision yet poetic abandon, building worlds that exist between perception and reverie. His landscapes remind us that nature is not only outside us but within us, ever changing, ever renewed.
Noha Wadi Moharram: A Curator of Vision and Continuity
At the center of this conversation stands Noha Wadi Moharram, whose curatorial vision transforms exhibitions into dialogues. Her sensitivity to the artistic process, her respect for individuality, and her unwavering faith in the power of art have made Art on 56th a cornerstone of Beirut’s contemporary art scene.
Since its founding in a century-old building in 2012, the gallery has stood as a testament to endurance. Even after the devastating Beirut explosion of 2020, Moharram rebuilt the space with courage and grace, turning loss into renewal and silence into song. Today, Landscape Conversationsreflects that same spirit, the human capacity to create beauty from fragility, to converse with time through art.
The Art of Continuation
Thirteen years after its inception, Art on 56th remains a space of continuity, curiosity, and creation. Landscape Conversations is not simply an exhibition; it is a statement of faith; faith in art’s ability to heal, to connect, and to transform. Through the eyes of six remarkable artists, Art on 56th celebrates the eternal dialogue between humanity and nature, between imagination and reality, between silence and expression.
Here, the landscape is not a destination; it is a conversation,one that continues to unfold, with beauty, depth, and infinite light.
