A Long-Awaited Homecoming: DAC Beirut Presents Nabil Kanso's Darkness and Light (Part I)
The art world is finally catching up to Nabil Kanso (1940-2019). Recent acquisitions by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Sursock Museum in Beirut, together their fresh critical attention from The New York Times and Artforum, have reaffirmed Kanso's place among the most important painters of the modern Arab world and on the international stage. His oeuvre confronts questions that feel as urgent today as they did when his work was first created, giving them a rare timelessness despite having been created decades ago. Writing in Artforum, critic Donald Kuspit situated Kanso alongside Otto Dix and Francisco Goya, while Martha Schwendener of The New York Times drew parallels between his paintings and the murals of Los Tres Grandes compared his Leaves from the Theater of War (1980-1992) series to Goya's The Disasters of War (1810-1820).
On 23 July 2026, Lebanon will present the first major solo exhibition of Kanso's work in the country of his birth. Presented by the Dalloul Artist Collective (DAC), Nabil Kanso: Darkness and Light (Part I) marks a long-awaited homecoming for an artist whose career spanned more than five decades and whose connection to Lebanon never faded. Kanso returned repeatedly to the country of his birth, witnessing defining moments in its history while building an international practice that explored war, literature, mythology, music, and the resilience of the human spirit. "I think an artist cannot detach himself from the world," he once reflected. "We are part of it, and we respond to it through art."
Darkness and Light (Part I) brings together paintings from The Split of Life series alongside a range of workd and archival material spanning the 1970s to the 2010s. The exhibition features major paintings inspired by the Lebanese Civil War, including the cover image of Kanso's twenty-year retrospective monograph, Lebanon (1983), Lebanon 1977: Vortices of Wrath, and Blazing Vortices: Lebanon Summer of 1982 (Sabra and Shatila). Running concurrently as part of Darkness and Light (Part II), the Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF) presents all 242 drawings from Leaves from the Theater of War, executed between 1980 and 1992. Together, the two spaces offer the most comprehensive exhibition of Kanso's work ever presented in Lebanon.
Opening Reception: Thursday, 23 July 2026 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM
Dalloul Artist Collective
Stone Garden Building, Marfa, Beirut
Exhibition on View: 24 July - 19 September 2026