DAC is pleased to share the opening of Lines of Belonging, a joint exhibition presenting Lebanese artist Fawzi Baalbaki alongside Qatari artist Salman Al Malek, currently on view in Doha, Qatar from 16 June through 16 August 2026.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Al Markhiya Gallery in Doha, Qatar and reflects DAC's ongoing commitment to building meaningful partnerships with cultural institutions across the region, bringing together artists, ideas, and audiences.
The exhibition unites two painters who, across more than five decades of practice each, have built visual languages rooted not in spectacle, but in human presence, emotional memory, and art's enduring capacity to carry meaning beyond representation.
Though grounded in different geographies and sensibilities, Baalbaki and Al Malek share a fundamental conviction: that painting is lived experience rather than fixed image. Their works more through reality searching for intimacy, tenderness, identity, and continuity within rapidly transforming societies.
For Fawzi Baalbaki, the painted line is an act of emotional survival. Figures, animals, and intertwined forms emerge through simplified gestures that oscillate between abstraction and recognition, inviting viewers to complete what the line leaves open. His compositions hold warmth, solitude, companionship, and fleeting joy within surfaces of deliberate lightness.
Salman Al Malek approaches painting as both cultural memory and contemporary proposition, negotiating the tension between authenticity and modernity. His practice explores social consciousness while remaining open to formal experimentation and is guided by a conviction that art must hold purpose, even when expressed through abstraction or colour.
Together, their works offer a space where form still carries feelings, abstraction remains human, and painting continues to serve as a bridge between memory, place, and shared experience.
Lines of Belonging is on view in Doha, Qatar, from 16 June to 16 August 2026.