Sunday Gathering, 2024, Mixed Media Collage on Canvas, 90 x 135 cm
For over four decades, Haibat Balaa Bawab has quietly pieced together a portrait of Lebanon where tradition is fluid and fragmented. A pioneer of collage media in the country, Bawab has forged her visual language by collecting what others often overlook: magazines, bills, and stamps – among many other historical residues she has used to map Lebanon’s changing cityscapes and landscapes, social strata, and nuanced cultural fabric.
Born in Beirut in 1952, Bawab’s connection to the city runs deep. She graduated with a BA in Fine Arts from Beirut University College (now the Lebanese American University) in 1975. This formative period would lay the groundwork for her ongoing exploration of the intersection between heritage, belonging, and artistic practice.
Around The Table, 2024, Mixed Media Collage on Canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Side Talk, 2024, Mixed Media Collage on Canvas, 135 x 90 cm
Recognition came early. In 1982, Bawab was awarded the first and only prize by the Central Bank of Lebanon for designing a new Lebanese currency. It was an honor that anchored her art in the country’s national identity. Her work would go on to be exhibited internationally, from the halls of Lebanon’s Sursock Museum and the Grand Palais in Paris to cultural institutions in Kuwait, Dubai, Bahrain, and Beijing – often under the patronage of Ministries of Culture.
Despite this global reach and recognition, her gaze would often return to her local roots, depicting a Lebanon at odds with itself: fractured yet rooted, nostalgic but also very much present. Capturing the country’s everyday life, people, and tensions, her canvases – whether collage or oil painting – are populated by scenes of city corners, rituals, and intimate interactions. It is how Bawab’s art, layered and colorful both literally and conceptually, speaks to the many textures of memory and society in dense compositions.
But beyond their contrast and complexity, her pieces appear to be active attempts at reconciliation, always grounded in cultural continuity and collective identity. Both high society and humble subjects meet in her motifs, from haute bourgeoisie opulence to the floral vibrancy of village life. The result is work that is deeply personal, intently observational, and socially expansive.
Celebration, 2023, Mixed Media Collage on Cardboard, 70 x 100 cm
Olive Yard, 2024, Mixed Media Collage on Cardboard, 70 x 100 cm
Her latest exhibition at Beirut’s Art on 56th Gallery, Timeless Traditions (January 2025), is no exception. But here, Bawab leans fully into her instinct and voice to safeguard cultural memory. In a series of mixed media collages on both cardboard and canvas, she more prominently uses her own papers, rather than clippings from external sources. And she experiments more, with techniques including calligraphy, etching, and silkscreen.
The context of these artworks – put together during a time of war and uncertainty in Lebanon – is also behind both their more pronounced abstraction and the beauty with which they defy the devastation outside. With a sense of both urgency and optimism, they ask, and perhaps answer: what do we choose to carry forward?
For Bawab, that’s impact on the art field that extends far beyond her works. She taught for 17 years at the Lebanese American University, and served as Fine Arts Coordinator at the American University of Science and Technology (AUST) between 2001 and 2022. Her work has been the subject of a 2012 monograph, Haibat Balaa Bawab: The Art of Collage, and she authored two volumes of the publication Beyond the Medium through AUST. A member of the Lebanese Association of Painters and Sculptors and the Artists Syndicate, Bawab continues to influence generations of artists and art lovers, stitching Lebanon’s many textures into a visual language all her own.
All images courtesy of the artist and Art on 56th Gallery.