Stephanie Chatila is a Lebanese painter whose work arises from a deeply personal search for identity and the ongoing tensions between logic and emotion. Her practise moves freely between abstraction and figuration, gesture and structure, offering a visual exploration of the contradictions that shape her. Throughout her practice, a body of work emerges that feels intimate and restless, grounded in the belief that identity is never fixed but formed through relationships, memories, and the inner conversations that slowly define us.

Stephanie Chatila in her studio in Beirut. Photo Courtesy: the artist

Chatila grew up in Beirut and became interested in art at a very young age. She pursued a double degree in Business and Fine Arts at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, which marked the beginning of her career as a painter. Her professional trajectory and her artistic practice are both characterised by this combination of art and business, creativity and structure. Her body of work is defined by its large scale and the tensions between rationalisation and emotion, abstraction and figuration, structure and gesture. Throughout her paintings, Chatila invites the spectator to delve into the enigmatic, spectral character of her work, dissecting the image, reading between the lines, and creating a space for introspection and self-reflection.

Stephanie Chatila, *Untitled (Conflict in Space Series),* 2023, acrylic on canvas, 160x100 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In her series Conflict in Space, her practice captures the visceral experience of attacking the emptiness of a blank canvas. She uses impulsive, emotionally charged gestures that function almost like a psychological journey, tracing the artist’s struggle to break free from constraint. The bold, expressive, free-flowing strokes in the background contrast with the more defined gestures in the foreground, transforming the artworks into a dialogue between the two opposing forces that constitute her as a person: logic and emotion, rationality and passion.

Her colour palette, characterised by the superimposition of dark and pale tones, reinforces the dichotomy of her work. Music also plays a vital role in her practice; while she works on her paintings, she listens to jazz and blues, especially rock and punk, inducing her into a trance-like state in which the rhythm of the beat translates into the velocity and intensity of the strokes, functioning as the guiding force in the composition of her works.

The way strokes of colour pile up, building and transforming the pictorial space, provides evidence of the dynamic, metamorphic nature of her work. Moreover, as she explains, the development of this series also influenced her confidence as an artist, moving from insecurity and slow experimentation when confronting the empty canvas, to spontaneity and artistic freedom through erasing, covering and layering her artworks. This series, therefore, functions as a mirror of Chatila's identity and a representation of the dialogue between her internal forces: the visceral and the cerebral, the intuitive and the measured, and finding balance amid her internal dichotomies.

Stephanie Chatila, *It’s the End of the Beginning,* 2025, mixed media on canvas, 200×150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

In her other series, titled Identity Formation, Chatila understands identity as a web woven by personal connections and meaningful relationships that ‘nurture and challenge her own inner self.’ The series comprises four paintings titled Sister, Father, Mother and First Love. She does not seek to portray these figures literally but to translate their identities into symbols charged with behavioural roles, emotions and affective tensions.

Stephanie Chatila, *Father (Identity Formation Series)*, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 200×150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

When searching for the representative element of each painting, she works with ‘symbolic rather than literal memory’. This process begins with the elaboration of a semantic map, asking questions such as ‘who are they? What do they represent? How do they exist in my life?’ From this, the objects, forms and gestures emerge. Each element, therefore, is charged with symbolic meaning.

Stephanie Chatila, *Mother (Identity Formation Series)*, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 200×150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

On the one side, the office chair symbolises her father's stability and practicality; the red curtain, pulled by a hand, symbolises her mother's passion and emotion, showing how Chatila's identity has been shaped by the duality of her parents' characters. On the other side, the Greek column, a symbol of support and ambition, represents her sister, offering her the consistent encouragement of an older sibling. Finally, the composition dedicated to her first love, the most abstract of the four paintings, seeks to capture, through free-flowing gestures and slightly warm colours, the openness and emotional learning that defined that relationship.

Stephanie Chatila, *Sister (Identity Formation Series)*, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 200×150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Throughout this series, drawing direct inspiration from David Lynch's ‘dual personalities and parallel realities’ and from Francis Bacon's ‘raw, emotional renditions of the human psyche’, the emotional and intuitive, the geometric and the free flowing, the symbolic and the figurative coexist in the same space, directly engaging with the deep contrast rooted in her practice. In this series, identity appears as an ever-evolving concept, a changing construct moulded by connections, experiences, and everyday gestures that accumulate, consciously and unconsciously, in her deepest self.

Stephanie Chatila, *First Love (Identity Formation Series)*, 2024, mixed media on canvas, 200×150 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Chatila has recently moved to London. After being forced to reduce the dimensions of her artworks due to a lack of space in her apartment, she is seeking an art studio that will allow her to continue producing large-scale works. Although her relocation has influenced the dimension of her current works, her investigation still revolves around identity and the dialogue between logic and emotion.

You can follow her work on Instagram.

Laura de Llobet-Verdes

Emerging Artists Co-Editor, MADE IN BED

Stephanie Chatila

Lucrezia Abatzoglu

HOME