Flesh Flowers: Selections from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection

Flesh Flowers: Selections from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection is on view at the Aïshti Foundation in Jal El Dib, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Roberta Tenconi. It opened on 26 October 2025 to mark the tenth anniversary of the foundation's exhibition space and is, in the foundation's words, "the first major presentation since the Foundation's programs were interrupted by the recent war." Il Giornale dell'Arte gives the closing date as 26 October 2026.

The exhibition brings together more than two hundred works by over seventy artists from the collection. Its title is borrowed from a work by Miriam Cahn, and it "delves into the complex intersections of bodies and paint, with a particular focus on the work of women artists in the collection." Painting dominates, with works that move between abstraction and figuration.

The foundation's text describes two main currents. Some artists reimagine what the critic Lucy Lippard called "eccentric abstraction", filling abstract painting with personal and collective histories; others turn to a "vernacular figuration" informed by feminist approaches to the body. Across both, "screens, pixels, vectors, and networks intersect with anatomies, stains, traces, and fluids."

The artists span several generations, from Betty Parsons, Carol Rama and Maria Lassnig to Cecily Brown, Julie Mehretu, Amy Sillman, Joan Semmel, Laura Owens and Toyin Ojih Odutola. Artists from the region include Etel Adnan, Samia Halaby, Mounira Al Solh, Dala Nasser and Miryam Haddad. Some of the works were previously shown in the exhibition Effetto Notte at Palazzo Barberini in Rome in 2024, according to Artribune.

The show is a large survey of recent painting drawn from a single Lebanese private collection, and the first exhibition at the foundation since its reopening. It sets out the collection's holdings of painting by women artists, with works dating from the 1950s to 2024.