Artsy's Bridget Gleeson looks at Alfred Basbous, Modernist Pioneer, the 2017 London survey of the Lebanese sculptor, an artist Tabari has since presented in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Artsy's Bridget Gleeson looks at Alfred Basbous, Modernist Pioneer, the 2017 London survey of the Lebanese sculptor, an artist Tabari has since presented in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
Gleeson tells the story of three brothers born in the village of Rachana in the 1920s, whose surname means light in Aramaic, and who all became artists and returned home to fill its streets with sculpture. The village became an open air museum recognised by UNESCO in 1997.
Alfred Basbous, the middle brother, was born in 1924 and worked in masonry before turning to sculpture. Early figures of animals and people in wood, metal and stone, inspired in part by Greek mythology and Phoenician sculpture, won him a scholarship to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1960, and a year later his work was shown at the Musée Rodin. He returned to Rachana to join his older brother Michel in reviving the village through art, opened the sculpture park in 1994 and kept working until his death in 2006.
The exhibition at Sophia Contemporary in London brought together twenty sculptures in bronze, marble and testa, a Lebanese limestone, with ten drawings made from the 1970s to the 2000s, which Gleeson reads as bold mixes of figuration and abstraction.
The London show was organised by Sophia Contemporary. Tabari later presented Basbous in Figurative to Abstraction in 2021 and at Abu Dhabi Art 2023.