Lot 34: * W AYMAN BAALBAKI (Lebanon, born 1975) Beirut City Centre (The Egg)

Ayman Baalbaki (Lebanon, born 1975)
Beirut City Centre (The Egg)
mixed media on canvas, framed
executed in 2015
250 x 200cm (98 7/16 x 78 3/4in).
FOOTNOTES
Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Beirut

"Beirut is the Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden." - Rabih Alameldine

The present lot is a superlative example of Ayman Baalbaki's inimitable monumental representations of Beirut architecture, depicting the iconic "Beirut City Centre Egg", an avant-garde symbol of Beirut's stunted cultural vitality.

Baalbaki's depictions of war-torn Beirut are a visceral, aesthetically overpowering testament to the destructive power of conflict, a destruction whose genesis, whilst physical, infiltrates, scars and distorts the collective consciousness of its sufferers.

Baalbaki's fixation with conflict is manifest throughout his life and work. Born in 1975, the year of the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, his family were forced to flee Rass-el Dikweneh when he was only a few months old. The sceptre of war would loom over Baalbaki's head throughout his life, with his home in Haret Hreik being obliterated during the Israeli attacks of 2006.

When it came to approaching his work as a painter Baalbaki naturally drew from the deep reservoir of memory formed by these disturbing experiences. Concerned with the link between imagery and memory, Baalbaki uses his art as a haunting aide-memoire to the conflict that has plagued Beirut, reminding people that even in times of relative piece, they should not disregard the deep systemic divisions that gave rise to conflict in the first place.

Baalbaki explains that this conceptual initiative is "based on what Nietzsche called the "imposition of memory. After the war, whoever had experienced it, tried to erase its effects and impact from his/her memory and surroundings, although the causes of war and its essence [were] still present in the city".

In light of this overarching agenda, Baalbaki's works accordingly focus on the aftermath of conflict, and the remnants of its destructive influence. The gap between the act of destruction and the time of depiction, which Baalbaki's works occupy, is part of a concerted effort to place a reflective emphasis on the theme of war; it is seldom in the eye of the storm where one can truly measure, discern and recognize the effects of destruction, it is only when the impact of war breaches the heat of the battle, permeating into the visual, emotional and psychological landscape that its true imprint becomes manifest.

The medium through which this imprint is made palpable by Baalbaki, is through the depiction of Beirut's war torn buildings; these buildings, like the individuals they contained, are perhaps some of the city's most important inhabitants, they are the edifices that signify identity, civilization, the existence of families and homes, they are the structures which give shelter, congregation, life, and industry to a population, they are the building blocks of the communities they house, and it is through their facades that the culture, history and collective narrative of their inhabitants are most immediately recognized.

It is these buildings which therefore wear most overtly the wounds of war, and whilst the human impact of conflict lives within the hearts of those who have survived it, and through the memories of those who have the fallen, the visual insignia of conflict is most tangible in the fragmentation of the civic space.

It is this fragmentation which Baalbaki seeks to document, reflect on, and ultimately immortalise in his canvases. Executed in a scale which captures both the architectural enormity of the buildings depicted, and the severity of the damage they have suffered, Baalbaki's paintings are striking vignettes of a city whose urban fabric has been punctured and mutilated.

The Egg

The Egg itself was commissioned as part of a ground-breaking cluster of modernist buildings in 1965, designed by the Lebanese architect Joseph Philippe Karam (1923-1976). The whole set was thought to be the 'Beirut City Center', a multi-use complex, which concentrated mainly on the hybridization of two programs: spaces for leisure activities (shopping mall, cinema) mixed with office spaces.

When the civil war started in 1975 the construction of the 'Beirut City Center' was still unfinished. Only the Egg and one of the two proposed towers had been constructed. During several periods of war in-between 1975 up to 2006 the development surrounding the Egg was destroyed and The Egg together with a large void for underground parking survived as the only remnants of Karam's original plan for the 'Beirut City Centre' . What remains is a phenomena at once paradoxical yet unique to Beirut, a "modernist ruin"