The Farjam Foundation is currently hosting Rupture Into Light, a powerful solo exhibition by Lebanese artist Marwan Sahmarani. It features a selection of large-scale paintings and studies, which include previously unseen preparatory works, tracing the arc of the artist’s journey through themes of rupture, memory, and renewal.
At the heart of the exhibition is a central work, Collision I, a painting physically scarred by the 2020 explosion in Beirut’s port. Sahmarani has left the tear visible, transforming the canvas into both a witness and a survivor. Thus, the painting becomes testimony. Other standout pieces, like Solitude of Lightning, echo themes of dissolution and emergence, fragility and strength. Through dense impasto, urgent brushwork, and bold chromatic contrasts, Sahmarani’s canvases convey emotional turbulence, yet also a sense of emergence, of light after darkness.
Accompanied by a thoughtful catalogue (edited with curatorial insight by Roxane Zand), Rupture Into Light situates Sahmarani’s work within a broader cultural and historical dialogue, one that references Lebanon’s recent past, as well as universal questions of trauma, identity, and regeneration.
About the artist
Marwan Sahmarani (b. 1970, Beirut, Lebanon), who is now based between Lebanon and Spain, graduated from l’École Supérieure d’Art Graphique Penninghen in Paris (France) in 1994. Then he lived between Canada and Lebanon, before finally returning to his homeland. His childhood and experience of displacement and migration have deeply shaped his sensibilities, creating an enduring tension between destruction and renewal, chaos and transcendence, at the core of his art.
Sahmarani’s practice involves painting, drawing, engraving, sculpture, and ceramics. His paintings often feature thick impasto, sweeping gestural strokes, charged colour palettes, and a kind of “fleshy” handling of paint, creating textures that evoke raw emotion, bodily movement, and collective memory.
Thematically, Sahmarani’s art interrogates cycles of violence and trauma, both personal and collective: how societies fracture, how people suffer, and whether repair is possible. His practice probes the line between destruction and regeneration, often leaving visible scars in his works as metaphors for memory and survival. At the same time, Sahmarani’s art seeks illumination. Light becomes a metaphor for healing, transcendence, and hope.
Sahmarani has displayed his works in many exhibitions, which include Abu Dhabi Art (2021 and 2020); Before the Blast (solo) (Leila Heller Gallery, Dubai, 2020); Contemporary Lebanon: Art beyond violence (The Lebanon pavilion, Singapore, 2014); the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale (Greece, 2011); and Told/Untold/Retold (Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar, 2010), among others. In 2010, Sahmarani won the Abraaj Capital Art Prize (Dubai).
For further details about Rupture Into Light, please visit the exhibition’s official webpage.
You might also be interested in exploring Continuum: The Unbroken Line of Persian Art.
To stay connected with the latest art news, you can follow our Telegram channel.
