Inaugurated on August 29, 2024, at Tanit Gallery Beirut, the exhibition “Sky Diary” by Bettina Khoury Badr will be on display until October 3. Through her canvases, which correspond to a personal diary, the artist invites spectators to discover an infinite vision of the world and transcend it.
The “Sky Diary” exhibition by Bettina Khoury Badr at Tanit Gallery reflects the cosmos in all its forms. The walls are adorned with paintings where blue predominates, like a personal diary that allows one to travel through space. The sky, the cosmos and nature are at the heart of her artistic work. Having left the city to live in an environment where nature prevails, the artist opened her eyes to another dimension of the world. She observes and scrutinizes the sky, creating fragments that she arranges like a puzzle. “Often, we don’t see the beauty and magic around us,” she says.
A graduate in fine arts from the Lebanese University, Bettina Khoury Badr has been teaching at the Lebanese American University (LAU) since 2007, where she regularly participates in exhibitions such as “State of Things” in 2022. She has exhibited her works at Kromatik Art Gallery in 2012 and at Art on 56th Gallery in 2018. Her paintings were presented in 2015 in “Mark on the Wall” in conjunction with the Virginia Woolf Conference at Bloomsburg University, as well as at the Sursock Museum’s “Salon d’Automne” in 2018, 2016 and 2012. More recently, she participated in group exhibitions “Togetherness” at Tanit Gallery and “How Will It End?” presented by the Boghossian Foundation and organized in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou.
The artist captures everything she sees in the sky—the passage of clouds, their shapes, the moon, the stars. “I love clouds,” she confides. “You can watch them transform at any time of the day. It made me realize how quickly time passes and how everything can change in our lives.”
In her work, the artist confronts the abstract with the figurative, the gestural with the still. Her work is inspired by the surrounding nature and events that are part of a recent and tumultuous past. Facing the vulnerability of existence and the uncertainties in an unstable country, she takes refuge in artistic creation and reflects on the fleeting nature of time and the human condition. “We are so small in the face of the universe,” she emphasizes.
Bettina Badr captures moments of daily life, like in a personal diary, recording the changing moods of landscapes on small pieces of paper using water-based mediums. She transposes these diary entries onto large compositions, creating organic and geometric shapes. The circles and squares she persistently uses echo the ancient symbols of spherical heavens and the solidity and materiality of the earth. These complex abstractions transform landscapes into subtle plays of colors and shapes. When placed in relation to one another, the landscapes begin to frame each other, and each piece interacts with the next. “My work has gradually evolved,” she says, “from watercolor studies to a series of grid paintings where small skies illuminate the pictorial space. The pattern is a visual puzzle. Each grid contains a portion of the image that contrasts or harmonizes with adjacent pieces, creating a holistic tapestry.”
The landscapes become constellations, inviting spectators to explore an infinite vision of our world that transcends perceptions. “Observe day and night simultaneously,” “reverse earth and sky,” “look at the earth from the moon,” exhorts the artist, making each work an open frame through which reality is reinvented.
The “Sky Diary” exhibition will continue until October 3, 2024, at Tanit Gallery, offering the audience a chance to be amazed and carried away into an infinite universe.
