Written by WAFA ROZ

Tagreed Darghouth was born in Saida, Lebanon, in 1979. In 2000 she received diplomas in painting and art education from the Lebanese University and Lebanese Teachers Institution, respectively. In the summers of 2000 and 2001, Darghouth participated in the Ayloul Summer Academy at, Jordan. The program was led by celebrated Syrian modernist Marwan Kassab BaChi (1934-2016), who had a significant impact on the young artist. In 2002, she moved to Paris to study Space Art at the École Nationale Supérieure des Art Décoratifs. She returned to Lebanon in 2003 to resume teaching at various public schools before committing solely to painting in 2007. 

Darghouth depicted the strife she witnessed during the 2006 Lebanon War with Israel in Falling Parts, her second solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute in Beirut (2006). Borrowing conceptually from Marwan’s Marionette series, the exhibition featured paintings of deconstructed dolls symbolizing the violence that occurred throughout the conflict. It was through this exhibition that the Lebanese gallerist Saleh Barakat saw Darghouth’s talent and invited her to exhibit at Agial Gallery in Beirut. 

Most of Darghouth’s work reflects on the feebleness of humanity by engaging popular culture and socio-political issues. In Mirror Mirror! 2008, she explored the relationship between plastic surgery and societal conceptions of beauty. She then painted domestic helpers for her 2010 exhibition Fair and Lovely, which commented on racial tensions and oppressive power dynamics between workers and their employers in Lebanon. Throughout this period, Darghouth’s canvases drew inspiration from the work of British portraitist Lucian Freud and controversial German artist Georg Baselitz.

Darghouth then delved into universal concerns in an abstract expressionist style. She addressed mortality, violence, and war in Canticles of Death (2011), a series of paintings of nuclear explosions and skulls. The English Rainbow (2011) depicts nuclear mushroom clouds in seven colors with corresponding nicknames coined by the British government during World War II. She highlighted the contrast between these innocuous nicknames (Violet Mist, Red Roses, Green Flax, Yellow Sun, and Blue Bunny) and the lethality of their corresponding weapons. In other paintings, she portrayed human skulls against ornamental backgrounds made of roses, suns, stars, and bunnies to bring attention to the morbidity in their contrast. 

Working with metallic renderings and a sober color palette, the artist depicted cameras, drones, and satellites as a commentary on surveillance culture in The Vision Machine, Shall You See Me Better Now?, held in 2015 at the Agial Gallery. The works in this exhibition investigate nation-states, corporations, and the blurred line between public and private space, augmenting and dissecting their subjects. Darghouth applies paint in thick impasto layers, favoring warm, muted colors over garish, violent hues. Her backgrounds consist of earthy tones and gestural, multidirectional brush strokes. She drips paint onto a wet canvas that she rotates herself, incorporating the element of chance into each work. 

Tagreed Darghouth’s mentor, Marwan Kassab Bashi criticized her for this dripping technique, likening it to “a woman wearing a dress with her underskirt showing underneath,” though it developed into her signature.

An avid reader and researcher, Darghouth is inspired by thinkers such as Slavoj Zizek and Stephen Graham and regularly revisits works by old masters such as Rembrandt Van Rijn and Gustave Courbet, as well as modernists Chaim Soutine and Willem De Kooning. Building on Zizek’s writing about the Palestinian concept of steadfastness (Al-Sumud in Arabic), her latest exhibition Analogy to Human Life (2019) addresses the systematic uprooting of olive trees by Israeli Forces in occupied Palestine. The paintings contrast life and death by depicting trees with vibrant blue-green leaves alongside morbid chopped trunks. Within that same context, she illustrated bloody hunks of meat, drawing from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox (1655).

Darghouth lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon.

Sources 

"Canticle of Death: Tagreed Darghouth’s skulls at Agial." Beirut Art Critics. December 08, 2011. Accessed November 20, 2017. https://artsbeirut.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/canticle-of-death-tagreed-darghouths-skulls-at-agial/

KHALAF, Colette. "Vous me voyez, mais est-ce que vous  m’entendez ? - Colette KHALAF." L'Orient-Le Jour. September 11, 2015. Accessed November 20, 2017. https://www.lorientlejour.com/article/943824/vous-me-voyez-mais-est-ce-que-vous-mentendez-.html

Simona Sikimic | The Daily Star. "Making art of the stuff of domestic servitude." The Daily Star Newspaper - Lebanon. Accessed November 20, 2017. www.dailystar.com.lb

Tomb, Marie. War Identities.When Words Aren’t Enough. Human Rights Watch, Beirut, Lebanon, 53Dots. Pub., 2016.

"معرض بيروت للفن 2017 دورة النضج و... الـ «عروبة»!" الأخبار. Accessed November 20, 2017. http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/283469

"جائزة “مؤسسة بوغوصيان” لتغريد درغوث وباسكال هاشم." Naharashabab. July 12, 2012. Accessed November 21, 2017. https://naharashabab.wordpress.com

Agial Art Gallery & Saleh Barakat Gallery - Darghouth, Tagreed. Accessed November 20, 2017. http://www.agialart.com/Artists/Details/18/Darghouth-Tagreed

Subtitled, With Narratives from Lebanon. Catalogue of the exhibition by APEAL at the Royal College of Art, London 3-6 November 2011 

A recorded interview with the artist on 12^thNovember 2017 – can be reached at DAF.