Kelly Halabi
Kelly Halabi, a Franco-Lebanese-American artist, sculptor, and painter, was born on August 21, 1991, in Paris and raised between Paris, Lugano, and Beirut. She studied Fine Arts at Parsons: The American University of Design in Paris. During her university years, she participated in four group exhibitions in Paris.
Her first solo exhibition, Before You Slip Into Unconsciousness, took place in October 2016 at Aimo Room concept store in Lugano, featuring over forty abstract and textured works. In January 2017, she participated in the ArtRooms Art Fair in London with an installation of recycled flower bouquets. That March, she held her second solo show at London's Hanover Gallery, presenting fused bronze and aluminum sculptures.
Renowned artist Helidon Xhixha invited Halabi to showcase her Carrara marble sculpture at the Cologne Art Fair. In September 2017, she exhibited two bronze pieces with CONTINI ART UK at the Beirut Art Fair and hosted a pop-up solo exhibition in Beirut. October 2017 saw her solo exhibition in Pietrasanta at Sala delle Grasce, displaying her Biosphere series. Halabi participated in the POSTWAR group show at Isorrophia gallery in Milan in November 2017. Her work is included in the Gabriele and Anna Braglia Foundation collection and has been auctioned at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In October 2019, she exhibited at The Rainbow House of Portobello in London.
During the pandemic quarantine, Halabi created a 14-meter mural titled Shades of People for the Docks restaurant in Lugano. She also presented an installation at the Maroggia Triennale in Switzerland in 2021 and showcased her first monumental sculpture at the Open Art Sculpture Park. In March 2022, she exhibited with Beit Collective in Paris, and in June 2023, she participated in STAGE 11 in London. Since graduating from Parsons, Halabi has held 20 exhibitions internationally.
Artist Statement
"Kelly Halabi’s works murmur to us of a past. Not of a history, a series of events, of heroes on horseback. Their past is a deep past. It is the past of phylogenesis as well as ontogenesis, of a geological or natural historical past, perhaps the past of genesis tout court.
Rock-like, her sculptures recall as much products of nature as culture, and their temporality mixes together the diachronic clock time of history with the synchronic deep time of being itself.
From this pair in symbol and myth comes forth the very desires and drives which are life itself: pleasure and pain. Yes, scarring, avoidance, and silence, these too murmur forth from the orifices and fissures within the surface of the objects.
...These sometimes scar-like incisions are jumbled masses that sometimes seem to strive towards but also to fly from full articulation, clearly rendered remainders of girders stick out. Bombed buildings bring back to us fragments of concrete and metal torn apart by war. They recall to us the violence and trauma afflicted upon her native Lebanon, but also all the violence and destruction that has been visited upon man by man, from time immemorial to time present. The violence that her pieces evoke is broader than homicidal, it is also ecocidal. Some works resemble nothing so much as trash eternalized, the marginal and willfully forgotten returned to us transfigured and rendered enduring. A reminder and a remainder both."
— Doctor Brad Tabas
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