Monuments

March 19 to May 2, 2026
Vernissage: Thursday, March 19, 5PM to 8PM

Bradley Ertaskiran is delighted to present Monuments, a solo exhibition by Chantal Khoury, centred on a new body of paintings that extend the artist’s ongoing unhardening of history.

Khoury’s oil paintings often draw from the artist’s personal history, conjuring images of inherited heirlooms and domestic staples tied to her Lebanese heritage. Outpouring water jugs, brimming carafes, and swirling rose petals ebb and flow. They are not always discernible, but certainly felt, in the way one passes a meal plate or remembers a family member’s perfume. A sense of abundance radiates beyond the canvas, making clear that these are not static remnants, but the stuff of life. The paintings hold a tension between tangible, touchable material culture and the fleetingness of their execution, whose ethereality more accurately reflects the complexity of objects shaped by a globalized world. In this way, Khoury aligns with scholars and artists from the Global South who reposition the qualities of line, colour, and form on equal footing with meaning. Her painted subjects have been fashioned by and passed through many hands, borders, and stories.

It is with this emphasis on fluid, evolving histories that Khoury developed her newest body of paintings. During a recent research trip to Europe, she encountered a striking, partially preserved monument of a lion on a pedestal. The fragmented sculpture, living far from its place of origin, seemed suspended between presence and absence, significance, and incompleteness. Half-recognizable, this stone giant spoke to her less as an emblem of power or violence than as something in motion, recalling symbols that shift over time, monuments that soften and thaw, circulating through human experience. Can an artefact, however complete, be less fixed, yet fully alive? How might their histories adapt, rather than being cemented into singular narratives, geographies, or temporalities?

Khoury mirrors this sense of motion and exchange in the very surfaces of her paintings. Her brushwork veils and animates in equal measure, rendering forms that feel ephemeral yet pulsing with life. Wisps of paint meet and dissolve, like sweeping soil from riverbanks, making edges between objects, land, and water uncertain. She creates artworks simultaneously, as she moves from one canvas to the next, adding and erasing, imbuing each mark and trace with a pulse, mirroring the rhythm of oral traditions of Arab culture. In this back-and-forth process, control is both asserted and relinquished only to build tidal waves that crash and multiply. Running steeds and roaring lions are coaxed into being, not as fixed images, but as autonomous, living companions. When the artist walks away, her paintings continue without her. 

Click here to learn more about the artist.

In 2023, Khoury received the prestigious Joseph Plaskett Award in Painting, which supported extended travel and research that led to the development of this new body of paintings.