My first meeting with Sara Badr was decisive in the choice of this exhibition. I met a young girl withdrawn but curious, full of life but reserved; a fierce desire to reach the goal. Sara’s passion for graphic design – her training at ALBA then in Paris – her love of colors, her education shared between the Lutheran reserve of maternal education and the controlled emotions of Near Eastern paternal education, pushed the youngster Sara to want to express in one form or another feelings or emotions hitherto prisoners. Painting brings her an objectivity that she had not known until then to decline. Despite her training as a graphic designer, Sara brings color atmospheres to the fore. A recent stay in Canada was instructive in the quest for the unspoken. It is this first work carried out with the aim of a desired, thoughtful exhibition that the French Cultural Center and Société Générale are pleased to present to you. Sara’s relationship to the visual arts is original. This exhibition is for our young artist (until then remained in his own pictorial intimacy) a first confrontation with others. The audience here plays the role of mirror; the artist needs this dialogue. The text which completes the expression of the artist’s subconscious plays a fundamental role here. Each canvas contains an autobiographical text; it is not a juxtaposed commentary but a second level of expression which only has real revelation within the painting. This is how Sara Badr wants to share with us her “exterior and interior”. Born in Stockholm, of Lebanese-Swedish origin, cradled in her childhood by a family that shares her time and her culture (parents, brother, sister) between Sweden, France and Lebanon, Sara maintains an emotional relationship with France. Franche-Comté, Burgundy, Ile de France are lands where it is resourceful. From the USA, she retains her passion for Robert Motherwell, whose interest in large formats and collages are certainly not foreign to our artist’s approach. Receptive to the colors of Scandinavia and the Lebanese coast, to the provincial sweets of France, to the mystical sounds of Johann Sebastian Bach, Sara offers us with her first exhibition a kind of intimate confessions that certainly augur a promising future.
