Christine Safa: Noces at Bortolami

Bortolami in Tribeca is presenting Noces, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the French-Lebanese artist Christine Safa. On view through October 24, 2026, the show brings together eleven works, all made in 2026.

Safa was born in 1994 in Le Chesnay, France, and is based in Paris. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Paris, she received the 2024 Jean-François Prat Prize, a major European award for emerging painters. The same year she was shortlisted by the French Ministry of Culture and the Archdiocese of Paris for the Notre Dame stained-glass commission. Her solo shows include Frac Auvergne, ICA Milano, Galerie Lelong & Co. and Praz Delavallade, and her work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the Musée d'Orsay and MUCEM. It belongs to collections including the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris and the Aishti Foundation in Lebanon.

Her method builds thin layers of pure pigment over fresco-like surfaces. The paintings here grow out of time spent moving around the Mediterranean: researching Italian churches, returning to her family's native Beirut, and working in her studio outside Paris. Figures emerge and recede while landscapes hover on the edge of dissolving, a tension that reflects how these places are at once political and metaphysical.

The recurring cast is drawn from her private life: her husband, her pet, the view from her window. They appear haloed by rainbows and crowned with sunflowers, raised toward the divine. Underlying the series is a question about how a whole memory can become a single image, and, like the sea, the paintings settle and vanish in turn.

The title borrows from Albert Camus's early essays, which celebrate summer, sea and sun through Algiers and the wider Mediterranean. Safa shares his interest in finding transcendence within landscape, light and daily ritual rather than beyond them. Set against displacement and war, her paintings act as tender gestures of faith, a way of holding life in amber against loss.

Titles on view include Vigne aux tournesols, Colombe, La convalescence, Horizon bleu indigo and La mer, parfois (bleu azurite). The gallery at 39 Walker Street is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, and by appointment.