Born in Beirut, Lina Jabbour grew up in Kuwait City, Paris and Jeddah. Though the Lebanese Civil War forced her family into exile, she returns to Beirut when possible. Television played an important role in her childhood, with information and images of current affairs central to her young world as she awaited news from her homeland. As much as cinema, especially with Egyptian or American movies. L. Jabbour describes an environment in which “Middle Eastern objects were very present: Syrian marquetry, Bedouin silverware, Palestinian embroidery, my grandmother’s crochet, Lebanese wool, big books of Arabic calligraphy, and above all the carpets that covered almost the entire apartment” (interview with L. Jabbour, 25 September 2023).
After high school, L. Jabbour studied at the École nationale supérieure d’art in Bourges, where she met Tacita Dean, who made a lasting impression on her. In 1998, after her graduation and a residency with the Asterides program at la friche Belle de Mai, where she also meets the team of Triangle, she subsequently moves to Marseille.The presence of the Mediterranean in the city is significant, both separating her from and connecting her to her country of origin. Since 2009, she teaches at the Clermont Métropole École supérieure d’art.

With an economy of means, L. Jabbour seizes the line in her work and creates variations based on selected elements. The dash, the point, the line itself follow a horizontal motion, here zigzagging, here right-angled, there blurred or let-loose and freed, as in Partitions (2022), Légers flous (2018), Zigzags (2022), 578 Nœuds (2023) or Cadences et grésillements (2020-2023). One coloured plane follows another, giving rise to new spaces on the surface of the image; colours clash dynamically, infusing each work with its own vibration. The compositional rigour of the images echoes their meticulous construction: cutting, colour blocking and repeated gestures combine, variation upon variation, to create the sensation of infinity.
There is a flowing back and forth. The figurative is more or less absent, or perhaps, more or less present. Strong at the beginning, the presence of the object – animals, plants or landscapes — gradually fades, the blur advances and absence prevails. The graphics and colours we see were there from the beginning, but have been replayed so many times, always with this same economy, that a radical transformation has befallen them. From volume to plane, they are synthesised in a work on the elementary.

A particular turning point in the artist’s career was her 2013 solo exhibition Nuages de poussière at the VOG, the contemporary art centre in Fontaine, Isère. At the time, L. Jabbour was researching the disappearance of representation, using a 1954 film about a nuclear test on Bikini Atoll as a starting point. In these images, we can just about make out the presence of palm trees and a car through the sandstorm that engulfs them, before their contours become increasingly indistinct, and soon give way to intense colour, a wash of orange, or what seems to be a weft of lines. The project continued and developed, and was later displayed in the 2017 exhibition Variations at Vidéochroniques in Marseille. With one final glance, everything fades away.
Since 2015 L. Jabbour has also explored tapestry, leading her to reflect on the idea of motif. In Études de tapis, she reduces a motif to its most basic structure. The eye loses itself in the microscopic, finds itself drawn into the infinitely small; from the motif it drifts closer to the weft’s structure. “A line goes off on an adventure” wrote Henri Michaux. The lines traced by L. Jabbour are the expression of a life on a startlingly original trajectory.