Bassam Geitani

Born in Lebanon in 1962 where he lives and works after living in Paris for fourteen years. Bassam Geitani holds a master's degree in art from the University of Paris I-Sorbonne and teaches fine art at the Lebanese American University. He has held various solo and group exhibitions in Washington, Beirut, Paris, and London. At Galerie Janine Rubeiz: “Psychologie de la matière” in 1998, “Le depli” in 2001, “Sueurs d’acier” in 2007, “Le pendule” in 2011, Clin D’œil in 2014, and most recently, “Nature Nature” in 2019. 

In 2006, He participated in the exhibition Pinceaux pour Plumes, for the benefit of the Lebanese Foundation of the National Library; and his work was acquired by the British Museum. His practice spans across painting, installation, film and performance. Geitani's work has been showcased in different venues and fairs, such as Art Dubai, the Sursock Museum, Artist's View in London, Visages francophones in Cahors, France, and Rebirth at the Beirut Exhibition Center.

The artist's works have been auctioned during the Christie's Auction Sale in Dubai in 2006 and 2007; his work has been acquired by private collections in Lebanon and France and is permanently exhibited at Galerie Janine Rubeiz.

About his work:

Profoundly inflected by specific theoretical endeavours, Bassam Geinati's work, spanning across different symbolic orders and layers of representation, is an on-going investigation of materiality and surface. An oscillation, sometimes pictorial and sometimes sculptural, allows objects to retain their own material properties even as they are being transformed and synthesized on the canvas into different organic arrangements. A general idea of equilibrium, inherited here not from mysticism but from the scepticism of science, unleashes centrifugal and centripetal forces that through motion, speed and rest, at different intervals, allow the world to remain fluid but yet fully formed.

Fascinated by scientist Leon Foucault's 'pendulum' and his empirical demonstration of the earth's rotation, Geitani takes on the mechanism's internal dynamic as an observation point. In this open field, he does not restrain his own material which is allowed to fluctuate in any direction.

Multi-sourced from the porous materiality of every day, Geitani's canvases are a tissue ready to absorb the sounds and pulsations of the immediate environment.

The geometrical shapes are not haphazard They're the result of visual investigations on the nature of living space.