Lebanese sculptor Anachar Basbous opens new museum

The attraction and atelier is located in the artist's home town of Rachana — the rural capital of the country's contemporary arts scene

The Mohtaraf Anachar Basbous museum was created to reflect the history and natural beauty of the land. Photo: Maghie Ghali

Renowned Lebanese sculptor Anachar Basbous’s new private museum and atelier is opening to the public on Saturday.

Mohtaraf Anachar Basbous, located in the artist’s home town of Rachana, has a collection about 50 works spanning the artist’s career — from his first sculpture at the age of 10 to the present day — and also pays homage to the sculptural works of his late father, Michel Basbous.

Designed by architect Jawdat Arnouk, the building is a brutalist, raw concrete structure incorporated into the mountainous landscape overlooking the sea.

Surrounded by an olive grove, both Arnouk and Basbous wanted the museum to reflect the history and natural beauty of the land, treating the building itself as a sculpture.

“We chose brutalist concrete for the whole building, a single material, so that the sculptures would not be competing with their surroundings and able to have breathing space,” Basbous tells The National.

“Rachana as a village overlooks the sea, so I wanted to reflect this in the building, even though it was a bit challenging architecturally to have a free-floating end of the building, without pillar supports.

“This land already had a history, so we wanted to create a building that would have its own presence but also coexist with the landscape and historic features.”

“In order to plant the olive trees, the villagers used to remove all the rocks and pile them in a single heap [rejmeh in Arabic].

“This land that I bought 10 years ago had the biggest rejmeh in Rachana, with a flat area on top, which locals had used as a baydar [threshing floor] — the place where the wheat harvest was threshed to separate the grains from their shells.”

The original rejmeh has been reshaped into a piece of land art by Basbous to echo the terraced ledges of the olive trees — using them as platform to display some of his sculptures — while keeping the flat top of the baydar. A stairway temporarily installed by the builders during the construction phase was later cast in concrete to preserve the feature.

In 1997, Unesco named Rachana a Global Village of Outdoor Sculpture due to the number of sculptors living there, showcasing their works street side to attract customers. In keeping with this tradition, many of Basbous’s works are outside the museum and can be seen as people drive past.

Born in Lebanon in 1969, Basbous studied at Paris’s Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Appliques et des Metiers d'Art (Ensaama) before moving back to Beirut in 1992 and opening his sculpture workshop in Rachana.

Over the years, he has produced a variety of contemporary sculptures in stone and wood — influenced by his father’s craft — and dabbled in mosaics before ultimately finding his own style, creating large, metal sculptures in corten steel and aluminium.

Basbous describes the piece he created at the age of 10 as a kind of foretelling of his now-signature style of work, which took decades to solidify. Unlike the smooth, classical-style sculptures his father and uncles made, Basbous is now known for fragmented or deconstructed geometric and spherical shapes made with metal.

“I was 10 years old, had no training or teachings yet, and my father’s sculptures were very different to this,” he says, looking at his first creation.

“I often ask myself why I created something like this. The idea of decomposition and reconstruction, which took me 40 years to get to, is right here in this first piece I created.

“I look at it and imagine I could have created it only a few years ago, but really this piece was a look into my future or the seed of creation planted inside an artist, even from a young age.

“After all my studies, the legacy of my family and their artistic styles exhausted me; I found I came back to something that was already inside me since I was 10. It’s a full circle.”

When his father died two years later, Basbous did not created another sculpture until he was 20 and felt the pressure to continue family’s legacy, many of the works he created emulating his father’s style until 2012, when he started to explore deconstructed shapes again.

“For me, the sphere is the most complete form and most of my work is a derivation of spheres,” Basbous says.

“The sphere shape is everywhere. It's in the cosmos, our universe; it's the atoms, the molecules, everyone from extremely small to extremely big. So it's universal.

“In my first exhibition in 2012, I did a deconstruction of a square to create movement and I think after that it all unfolded before me.

“The piece is now at the front of the museum.”

Anyone wishing to visit the museum can do so by appointment and may even be given a personal tour by the artist if he is available. Basbous intends to continue creating from his studio in Rachana and is working on a new exhibition, which will be shown at his new museum upon completion.