Midlife

Midlife is a solo exhibition of paintings by the Lebanese visual artist Hanan Houhou at Wadi 99 Art Gallery, Omar Daouk Street, Beirut Central District, from 24 September to 24 October 2026. The gallery, which is dedicated to sculpture, presents it as a benevolent exhibition within its Wadi Hosts programme of hosted exhibitions.

According to the gallery, "the female figure becomes a space of memory, tension, vulnerability, and transformation." The paintings use "gestures, fragmented poses, masks, bandages, suitcases, reflections, and patterned environments" to create "a visual vocabulary through which private experience intersects with questions of identity and belonging." The works, the gallery writes, "move through psychological states of waiting, departure, confinement, resilience, and return."

In her statement Houhou describes midlife as "a period of transition, a moment when the roles, relationships, and certainties that have shaped our lives may begin to shift," and refers to the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hollis. "Rather than defining midlife as a crisis," she writes, "I approach it as a space of questioning and transformation, a place between what has been lived and what is still unfolding."

Hanan Houhou was born in 1970. She is the founder of Atelier Hanan Houhou and Head of Interior Architecture at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Architecture of the Lebanese University, where she has taught since 2007. Her practice centres on the full-bodied female form, and she works primarily on large-scale canvases, using scale to create immersive encounters between the viewer, the painting and the surrounding space.