Born in 1954, Ghassan Zard’s path into art was far from conventional, yet never accidental. Trained as a dentist, he spent eight years in clinical precision while also turning his tools - plaster, resin, dental instruments - toward expression rather than repair. His first works emerged from the very materials meant to restore others.

In 1985, he held his debut exhibition at Épreuve d’Artiste in Kaslik. A second show followed in 1989 at Gaby Daher’s gallery in Badaro, unfolding just before the violent conflict reignited in Lebanon. Days later, Zard left Beirut for Paris, a city that would both displace and transform him.

There, he studied at the Paris Ateliers and built a parallel career in antique dealing, handling objects steeped in history and survival. These twin practices -formal study and tactile memory- nourished his evolving voice. Influenced by Japanese literature, his work began to explore the fragile tension between restraint and rupture.

In Munich, a collaboration with Galerie KEMPF opened new possibilities. Back in Lebanon, he exhibited in 1995 and 1998. When he returned to Beirut in 2000, he opened an antiques gallery, reconnecting with material history. In 2008, he resumed art-making with a show at Galerie Rochane, leading to a pivotal partnership with Galerie Tanit in 2012. For over thirteen years, Tanit has become a home and international platform for his work, supporting exhibitions in Beirut, Paris, Verona, and through hors-les-murs projects and major art fairs.

Zard’s practice is one of constellations: poetry, painting, and sculpture coexist and converse. His writing is imagistic and direct; his visual art abstract, searching, and uneasy. Creation often unfolds in parallel threads, with multiple bodies of work evolving at once.

Beneath the surface of his seemingly calm paintings lies a sublimated violence—a muted scream, an elegant scar. His sculptures navigate imagination, memory, and trauma, shaped as much by psychoanalysis as by material curiosity.

Through decades of detours, silences, and reinventions, Ghassan Zard has turned the invisible into form, making space for the emotions we often refuse to name, and allowing them to speak.