Sara Chaar

Sara Chaar is a Lebanese visual artist, born in Miami, Florida, in 1986 and based in France. She works in painting, drawing and video art. Her abstract canvases combine cold wax and oil paint in translucent layers. She scratches, scrapes and partly erases them with screwdrivers, cutters and palette knives, so soft colour meets the marks of the tools.

Beirut, which her gallery names as her hometown, is a recurring point of reference. The series What Remains on the Walls layered copied imprints of marks found on the city's walls into large paintings. For An untitled body, shown at Galerie Claude Lemand in Paris, she turned to microscopic images of cells and close views of her own body. Repository of Memory and Clarity is fleeting, both 2023, belong to it.

Chaar held a solo exhibition at James Baird Gallery in Pouch Cove, Canada, in 2020, and was in residence at the Pouch Cove Foundation from 2019 to 2020. Further solo shows have taken place at Art on 56th Gallery in Beirut, Marie Jose Gallery in London, Tom Christoffersen Gallery in Copenhagen and CJ One Gallery in New York. In 2021 she took part in Lumières du Liban at the Arab World Institute in Paris, which holds her work in its collection.