Hiba Kalache

Lyles & King is pleased to present Flowers Do Cry, a solo exhibition of abstract oil paintings on canvas by San Francisco-based artist Hiba Kalache. This is her first solo exhibition with the gallery and in New York. Flowers Do Cry formally addresses contemporary approaches to abstraction and its conceptual capacity to express aspects of experience and memory that language cannot capture. Kalache's paintings encapsulate the sensuality and intricacies of sound, filtered through the lens of her female body, creating tension of auditory and visual sensations.

While the eleven paintings that make up Flower Do Cry were entirely created in California’s San Francisco, their surfaces hold a memory of Lebanon’s capital city Beirut, where the artist is from. On August 4th, 2020, while in her home city, a large quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the city’s Port exploded, marking one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions in history. The chaos and despair that befallen the city in its aftermath forced Kalache to move back to the Bay Area, where she had previously studied.

In each painting, Kalache translates the memory of that sonic dimension of warfare into vivid shades of blues, greens, and red, distributing them across her canvases with heavy brush strokes, runny streaks, and deliberate marks. Her choice and combination of colors is extracted directly from Beirut’s urban landscape, one that is marked by decades of sectarian divisions and regional conflict. “ I've immersed myself in an obsessive ritual of blind automatic drawing and mark making,” she says. “This has evolved into automatic gestural Arabic writing, all in the context of exploring Helene Cixous's concept of ecriture féminine.” She focuses on the non-lisible traces, which allows for freedom and abstraction from patriarchal, phallocentric readings, oppressive ideologies, and xenophobia.

Kalache’s process is one that yields to artistic expression, usually demonstrated through overlayed strokes of vibrant colors, brushed on a raw gessoed canvas. She approaches each body of work serially, creating paintings that are at once unique and interconnected. “As in an orchestrated choreography, I tackle five to six large surfaces simultaneously, letting them evolve with patterns and colors that build upon each other.” The act of drawing through rapid gestures remains a vital, intuitive, and emotional aspect of her painterly method. She developed a practice focused on repetition, translation, or a deliberate absence of translation. When she paints, she explores rhythm and cacophony, challenging established rules of listening and disrupting conventional notions of time and pace. “This approach allows for an exploration of the ‘belliphonic’, and troubling definitions of listening to and remembering war, adding layers to the viewing experience,” Kalache says.

In her masterful exploration of color, Kalache’s paintings whisper secrets of emotion, urging us to pause, to feel, and to reflect upon the beauty that might be hidden within daily experiences and even violence. Each shade meticulously selected to evoke a particular emotional response. From the stark austerity of monochromatic compositions to the riotous explosion of vibrant tones, her work demands attention and introspection. But beneath the surface beauty lies a deeper truth, a sense of existential unease that permeates Kalache's work. There is a tension, a sense of disquietude that lurks beneath the surface, challenging the viewer to confront the complexities of the human condition. In this sense, her paintings serve as a mirror, reflecting back to us our own fears, desires, and vulnerabilities.

Hiba Kalache (b. 1972, Beirut, Lebanon) has presented solo exhibitions at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut, Lebanon; The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, Beirut, Lebanon; and Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA. Her work has been exhibited in group exhibitions at Beiteddine Palace, Beit ed-Dine, Lebanon; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France; Villa Romana, Florence, Italy; Beit Beirut Museum and Urban Cultural Center, Beirut, Lebanon; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans, LA; The Boghossian Foundation, Brussels, Belgium; California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA; and the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA. Kalache lives and works in San Francisco, CA.