Sana Galley presents their opening exhibition: "Kisses of an Enemy", featuring Thaer Maarouf and Semaan Khawam. This exhibition lays bare Thaer Maarouf and Semaan Khawam’s desire to speak with a distinct voice through their art, a powerful representation of the recurring human themes of freedom, injustice, pain and joy.

About the Artists

Born in Shabha, Syria in 1972, Thaer Maarouf explores in his series of paintings the limits of ‘seeing’. his exhibited body of work includes paintings portraying concealed human figures and faces behind layers of longitudinal lines or trickled with tiny Jasmine flowers. in these paintings, we look through those thin lines to a reality intentionally blurred by the artist, as if to say that we do not really see or that we cannot realistically convey the historical and almost always violent images that we are bombarded with daily in the news. his installation, “Veto,” speaks to the emotional scars of a people in the midst a civil war and contrasts these with the inadequacy of our international political architecture.

Semaan Khawam, who has both Syrian and Lebanese origins, was born in 1974 and has been living in Beirut since his teenage years. With this new body of work, Khawam somehow draws a possible route back to the country he left. in his paintings and stencil work, he seeks to explore the human and societal consequences of the events occurring in syria with a technique bursting with subtle elements drawn from his graffiti art and poetry practices. The artist is interested in working through portraiture to reveal the dramatic reconfiguration of families in the aftermath of the massacres and violent events taking place in syria. his paintings depict abstract human figures, destitute of any characteristics, shadowy beings. he represents children playing, holding flowers and jumping rope; all of them blackened, their human features effaced.