ARTnews published Standout Works at the 2022 Biennale de Lyon on 30 September 2022, a list of highlights from the 16th edition of the biennale, titled Manifesto of Fragility. Among the artists selected is Chafa Ghaddar, described as a Lebanon born, Dubai based artist who walks a fine line between sculpture and painting, figuration and abstraction.
The entry invites readers to imagine coming home after a long day and throwing a coat onto the sofa: this, it says, is what seems to have happened to Ghaddar's drapery like Exhausted Forms. The work weighs 132 pounds and took four people to install in the depths of the Lugdunum Musée et Théâtres Romains, an antiquities museum designed like an underground cathedral. Ghaddar wanted the piece to appear as if sitting by itself on a stone block. "I wanted something fleshy, almost tender, inhabiting the space that had been offered to me," she tells the magazine. Built from 12 layers of stucco, the humanised canvas almost makes the museum feel like home. She adds that the underlying promise of frescoes is permanence, yet their resistance to time proves their fragility; fold the piece and it will crack or break.
Born in 1986, Chafa Ghaddar trained at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in Beirut and studied fresco in Florence. Exhausted Forms was later shown in Dubai in her solo exhibition Beneath Latent Skies at Tabari in 2023. She is represented by Tabari.
