In “Sixty-One Faces of Winter”, Omar Khouri presents a series of his signature portraits, executed in acrylic and gouache, but turning away from his earlier exploration of politics and identity, towards introspection. All these self-portraits were conceived as a visual journal, painted day by day, in the course of a two-month long artistic residency in Paris, during the winter of 2013. The concept of portrait, in its attempt to capture the objective reality of a person, is expanded into traces and sentiments, sometimes amalgamating with the surrounding environment, sometimes hiding.
As a sequence, this almost cinematic performance of figure and form, transforms the gallery’s exhibition space into a three-dimensional site where an arresting image of human solitude becomes omnipresent and veers away from the vanity of the portrait: How to represent ourselves in this age and time? How to represent ourselves under the conditions of technology and dispersion? The artist is testing the boundaries of these possible representations and treating portraiture as introspection. A dialogue between different orders of memory and experience is established through layer and difference.
Omar Khouri was born in London in 1978, and spent his formative years in Lebanon. He earned a degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. After working in cinema and television in Los Angeles, he returned to Beirut. Khouri founded in 2006 Samandal, the first experimental comics periodical in the Arab world. His work spans across painting, comics, animation, theater, film and music. He lives and works between Beirut and London.
