Flesh Flowers assembles the work of over seventy artists and more than two hundred pieces from the Tony and Elham Salamé Collection. Borrowing its title from one of Miriam Cahn’s works in the collection, the exhibition delves into the complex intersections of bodies and paint, with a particular focus on the work of women artists in the collection.

This show marks the tenth anniversary of the inauguration of the Aïshti Foundation exhibition space in Beirut, and it is the first major presentation since the Foundation’s programs were interrupted by the recent war.

The works in the exhibition combine abstraction and figuration to complicate relationships between form and content, medium and meaning, subjectivity and otherness. In an era saturated with digital images and disembodied data, these artists simultaneously reassert and question the physical materiality of painting. Each artist approaches the canvas as a site of intense negotiation: between the raw immediacy of the gestural mark and the emergence of recognizable forms; between the tangible presence of the body and its fractured representation in a hyper-mediated society. Screens, pixels, vectors, and networks intersect with anatomies, stains, traces, and fluids in an intense conflation of the carnal with the digital. Abstraction gives way to fleeting suggestions of flesh, or conversely, figurative elements dissolve into fields of pure color, texture, and information.

Many artists in the exhibition are reimagining a new kind of “eccentric abstraction,” to borrow a term coined by legendary curator Lucy Lippard. They infuse the presumed neutrality of abstraction with personal narratives and collective histories. This “queer abstraction,” as it has also been called, refuses the grandiosity, heroism, and sentimentality typically associated with 1950s nonfigurative painting, favoring instead a more porous, receptive attitude.

Other artists in the exhibition approach the representation of the body through the lens of a vernacular figuration, imagining new fantastical anatomies recombined according to secret trajectories of desire. In these works—often informed by feminist approaches to figuration—conventional notions of beauty, taste, and propriety are subverted by a cursive, grotesque imagination that combines academic traditions with popular influences.

Just as they blur distinctions between abstraction and figuration, many of the works on view engender a productive confusion between the handmade and the digitally rendered: Artists move from the artificial to the natural and back again, dissolving any boundary between reality and fiction. It is a kind of “painting beside itself,” as art historian David Joselit describes it: constantly networked and expanded in the endless redistribution of media platforms and various economic systems that this type of painting consciously inhabits.

Through these dialectical juxtapositions, the works in Flesh Flowers confront us with a profound tension—the organic versus the encoded, the tactile versus the virtual. Complicating distinctions between the handmade, the mechanical, and the digital, the artists in the exhibition not only reflect on how bodies and data are bound together in contemporary culture but also challenge the very understanding of what it means to see and feel—imagining new subjectivities and ways to connect with ourselves and each other.