Multiverses by Bassam Kyrillos

Mark Hachem Gallery - Beirut is delighted to present “Multiverses”, a solo exhibition by artist Bassam Kyrillos, featuring a selection of his most recent sculptures.

His recent works explore the narratives of place through cycles of destruction and regeneration. Inhabiting the border zones between devastation and renewal, Bassam Kyrillos creates sculptures of an alternate urbanity; a place bearing witness to its history and simultaneously regenerating itself. These structures bear the marks of conflict and also burst with organic potential, searching or strategies of survival that are essential to the continuation of life.
In the world of "multiverses" we look for the inevitability of existence and we ask about the realness of the place. A scientific study states that the substance that makes up everything does not really exist, but we live in a space of holograms composed according to the ideas of each individual.
We know that the universe in which we live started with the "Big Bang", which resulted in space and time and after which came nature and life that are violent in their nature. So according to Kyrillos, instead of determinism in a world of multiverses ruled by violence, reality derives its existence from ideas, information and consciousness.
In his sculptures, the place takes the form of the building, where the forms accumulate horizontals and verticals in a combination that simulates war, violence, destruction and death, but in parallel all of the visual elements reflect the resurrection, the hope and the peace. In the midst of this dualism, the face of human reflects the miracle of life, the secret of consciousness and the force of the mind.
Bassam Kyrillos is a Lebanese sculptor living and working in Byblos, Lebanon. His body of work spans both the monumental and the figurative, showing mastery in several media including untraditional techniques in casting bronze and aluminum and the incorporation of industrial materials.
A PHD holder from the University of Sorbonne, Bassam has exhibited locally and internationally, notably at the Sursock Museum in Beirut and several International Biennales, including the Islamic Biennial in Iran and the Biennial of Alexandria in Egypt. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions and art fairs in Paris, Moscow, Hong Kong, Basel, Dubai and Beirut. Since 2001 Bassam has been a professor of Fine arts at the Lebanese University in Beirut.