Charline von Heyl
September 12, 2025 – January 31, 2026 | Aishti Foundation, Beirut
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Roberta Tenconi, the exhibition brings together over seventy women artists from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection, presenting more than two hundred works that explore the body as both subject and medium, revealing its shifting presence as image and as absence.
As Flesh Flowers celebrates the Foundation’s tenth anniversary, it also celebrates a city and a collection, negotiating their place within a changing cultural landscape. For Tony Salamé, the exhibition is more than a curatorial statement—it’s a declaration of continuity. A reflection on how to build a body of works that reflects both a place and a world in flux, on how to speak publicly about collective futures, and on the role of art in preserving faith in matter, gesture, and community after rupture.
In an era saturated with digital images and disembodied data, these artists simultaneously reassert and question the physical materiality of painting. Each artist approaches the canvas as a site of intense negotiation: between the raw immediacy of the gestural mark and the emergence of recognizable forms; between the tangible presence of the body and its fractured representation in a hyper-mediated society. Screens, pixels, vectors, and networks intersect with anatomies, stains, traces, and fluids in an intense conflation of the carnal with the digital. Abstraction gives way to fleeting suggestions of flesh, or conversely, figurative elements dissolve into fields of pure color, texture, and information.