INSIDE OF OUTSIDE

Art on 56th Gallery in Gemmayzeh, Beirut, presents INSIDE OF OUTSIDE, new abstract paintings by the Lebanese visual artist Sara Chaar, from 9 to 30 October 2026. The paintings are made in oil and wax, laid down coat by coat, then hidden, scraped away and painted over again. The show opens on Friday 9 October 2026.

The starting point is Beirut itself. Chaar works from photographs of the worn walls and split facades of the city, lifting fragments of form from those images. The fragments return from canvas to canvas and act as a shared vocabulary for the whole show. The walls are never copied. They are points of departure, and the cracks, marks and uneven edges they carry become compositions in their own right.

Each painting is built in stages. A layer goes on, disappears under the next, is scratched away and then worked again, so that earlier passages may vanish or come back changed. The gallery describes this cycle as construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. The palimpsest, a surface where new layers gather while older traces persist, is the idea that holds the group of works together.

The paintings keep no fixed scale. Seen one way, they suggest land viewed from above, broken territories, geological formations or worn maps; seen another, they turn to skin, scars, veins and the inside of the body. In her statement Chaar writes: "A landscape can become a body; a body can open into territory." Born in Miami in 1986 and based in France, she works across painting, drawing and video art. The curatorial text is by Noha Wadi Moharram, founder and director of the gallery. The exhibition can be visited Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.