Working across drawing, painting, and sculptural installation, Kalache explores the intersections of memory, landscape, and the body, examining how political histories become embedded in personal experience. Informed by the histories and ongoing realities of the Middle East and her home in the SF Bay Area, her practice considers conflict, displacement, and belonging through an intimate, embodied perspective.
The gallery will introduce Kalache’s work through two upcoming art fair presentations and her first solo exhibition with the gallery. In December 2026, Catharine Clark Gallery will feature Kalache at Untitled Art, Miami Beach, alongside new paintings by Julie Heffernan and a photo-based installation by Stephanie Syjuco. In January 2027, the gallery will present her work at FOG Design+Art in San Francisco, alongside new works by Arleene Correa Valencia and sculptures by New York–based artist daaPo reo.
Kalache and reo will each have a solo exhibition opening at Catharine Clark Gallery on Saturday, January 9, 2027, marking both artists’ solo debuts with the gallery. Their work was included in the exhibit Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents, curated at Fridman Gallery, NY, earlier this year. Their exhibitions will culminate Roots & Shoots, the organizing concept for the gallery’s 35th-anniversary year, which considers how long-standing relationships and established commitments can support new work, voices, and directions.
Gallery founder Catharine Clark writes, “Working with Hiba Kalache to include her paintings in Double Bind: Belonging and Its Discontents deepened my appreciation for the care that informs her practice. Her work speaks to what it means to inhabit a female body—to be a mother, a daughter, and a person whose memories and relationships are carried in the body. I find her approach powerfully empathic, with an intimacy that conveys the emotional depth of familial experience. Her engagement with traditions of miniature painting, ornamentation, and literature invites close attention to stories that emerge through fragments, gestures, and stains—marks that leave room for us to enter her compositions through our own experiences. I’m grateful to Claudia Altman-Siegel for introducing us to Hiba’s work through her gallery and delighted to welcome Hiba to ours.”
Kalache returned in 2021 to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she had previously earned her MFA, following the August 2020 explosion at the Port of Beirut, which devastated large areas of the city. The explosion marked a significant shift in her practice, prompting a sustained investigation into the aftereffects of trauma and its reverberations through individuals, communities, and geographies. Her recent paintings explore the relationship between memory and perception, translating experiences of loss, displacement, and rupture into visual form.
Layered with luminous washes of oil and acrylic ink, gestural marks, textured embellishments, and bursts of color, Kalache’s paintings evoke fragmented landscapes, fragments of wallpaper and references to her childhood home, female bodily forms, and emotional states without resolving into fixed narratives. Moving between abstraction and figuration, her canvases trace the instability of memory and the persistence of feeling, bringing personal experience into dialogue with collective history. References to literature, philosophy, landscape, and the female body emerge and recede throughout her compositions as she explores vulnerability, resilience, care, and transformation.
Kalache earned her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco, in 2005. Prior to her representation by Catharine Clark, she was represented in San Francisco by Altman Siegel, from 2023 to 2025. There, her work was presented in two solo exhibitions: Belliphonic (2023) and Embodiment (2025). She has also had solo exhibitions at Lyles & King, New York; Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut; and The Running Horse Contemporary Art Space, Beirut.
Her paintings has been included in group exhibitions at the Consulate General of France in San Francisco; the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; Villa Romana, Florence; Beit Beirut Museum and Urban Cultural Center, Beirut; the Boghossian Foundation – Villa Empain, Brussels; the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans; the San José Museum of Art, California; and California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Musée de l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum). Her solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery opens on January 9, from 2 to 4pm.
Pictured from top, artworks by Hiba Kalache: exile moves like water, 2026; the sea swallowed a woman, 2026; porousness, 2026; matrixial gaze, 2026. Below: artist Hiba Kalache with gallery founder Catharine Clark in the artist's studio.
