Art on 56th Gallery is pleased to present INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, a solo exhibition by Lebanese visual artist Sara Chaar, bringing together a new body of abstract paintings inspired by the weathered walls and cracked facades of Beirut.
Working from photographs of the city’s surfaces, Chaar extracts fragments of forms that become a recurring visual vocabulary throughout the exhibition. Rather than reproducing the walls themselves, she transforms their fissures, traces, and irregularities into compositions that move between landscape, territory, and the body.
For INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, Chaar works with oil and wax, building successive layers that are covered, scraped back, and reworked. What lies beneath is sometimes concealed and sometimes allowed to reappear, creating surfaces in a constant state of transformation. This process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction is central to this body of work.
The concept of the palimpsest runs throughout the exhibition. Layers accumulate without entirely erasing what came before. Traces remain active beneath the surface, shaping what appears above them. The paintings resist a single interpretation, shifting between aerial landscapes, fragmented territories, eroded maps, skin, and the interior of the body.
INSIDE OF OUTSIDE explores this movement between exterior and interior, asking where one ends and the other begins. The walls of the city become intimate terrains, while the body itself can be read as landscape. Through material, gesture, and repeated acts of revealing and concealing, Chaar creates surfaces in which what is hidden remains as significant as what can be seen.
Born in Miami, Florida, Sara Chaar is a Lebanese multidisciplinary visual artist whose practice spans painting, drawing, and video art. Currently based in France, she has exhibited internationally in Lebanon, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, the United States, and Canada. Her work is held in numerous private and public collections, including the Arab World Institute (IMA) in Paris.
INSIDE OF OUTSIDE continues Chaar’s exploration of layered surfaces, memory, transformation, and the relationship between the visible and the concealed.
- Noha Wadi Moharram
