SANDRA KHEIR SAHYOUN

As a teenager, Sandra took drawing and painting lessons in workshops where she had the chance to meet Lebanese painting masters, Paul Guiragossian and Samir Tabet, who would mark and encourage her to pursue her passion. At the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, she tirelessly trained herself to grasp the anatomy of the human body which had fascinated her for so long. This attraction for human forms, expressed through shadows and curves that emerge and die on paper, fills her paintings, particularly her portraits, with emotions. Humans have since become and remain to this day one of her favorite themes. She studied Interior Architecture and Design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in Beirut, where she excelled and out of which she emerged with a conviction: Creativity is a free essence that would allow her to abolish academic boundaries between interior and exterior design, object design, and even plastic arts.Decidedly multidisciplinary, Sandra was invited to teach Interior Architecture at ALBA. In 2009, she launched in Beirut, in the industrial city of Bauchrieh, her Architecture and Design studio, a space where she exhibits her furniture and paintings, creations she makes with as much vigor as she puts into her other residential projects: buildings, hotels, officers, wooden chalets.

KEY EXHIBITIONS

For her first exhibition in 2006 at Robert Mouawad Private Museum, Beirut, she painted around forty portraits drawn and photographed during her travels in Yemen, India and Nepal. So many faces that told the poignant stories of their country and their culture.Further echoing this cultural mix, she participated in numerous exhibitions in Beirut, Paris, and Vienna where she exhibited her painting in galleries (Kunstraum Gallery – Avatar Gallery), Raiffeisen Bank’s central hall, the parliament, as well as the Vienna City Hall (Rathaus).

December 2020, Artists of Beirut Collective Pop up Show Season One :“Tribute to Beirut”, Beirut, Lebanon

SELECTED ARTWORKS