From 9 May to 22 November 2026, Lebanese artist Hala Schoukair will participate in the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled In Minor Keys, curated by Koyo Kouoh. The curatorial premise—attuned to subtlety, intimacy, and tonal restraint—feels uncannily aligned with Schoukair’s lifelong investigation of scale and perception.
Born in Beirut in 1957, Schoukair has developed a practice rooted in discipline and devotion. Working with a single brush and often a single color, she constructs her paintings through repetition: a line bent into a unit, sutured to another, and another still. The gesture is neither mechanical nor decorative. No two units are identical. What emerges is a field of pulsation—organic, mineral, cellular—where density gathers and gradually dissolves.
Her subjects are deceptively modest: a grain of salt, a pine seed, the heart of an artichoke. Yet within these microcosms, entire ecosystems unfold. Schoukair’s work proposes that infinity is not accessed through spectacle, but through proximity. The vastness of the universe is encountered in the smallest of particles.
There is an ethics of looking embedded in her surfaces. The viewer is compelled to slow down, to trace with the eye the tautness of pigment as it thickens, then thins. Tension builds and releases within the same chromatic register. Painting becomes duration—an accumulation of time made visible.
As president of the Saloua Raouda Choucair Foundation, Schoukair also extends her commitment to abstraction into the realm of legacy and continuity. At Venice, in a biennale attentive to “minor keys,” her work resonates as a quiet insistence: that attention itself is radical, and that in the intimate, the infinite persists.
