Ayman Baalbaki is a Lebanese painter and installation artist. He was born in 1975 in Dekwaneh, an Eastern suburb of Beirut, in a family of artists. Originally from Adaisseh, South Lebanon, the Baalbakis experienced displacement during the Lebanese War as they were forced to move to Wadi Abou Jamil, Beirut’s old Jewish neighbourhood. Ayman Baalbaki studied at the Lebanese University, then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) and Université Paris VIII Vincennes.

Baalbaki is known for two major bodies of works that have evolved through his career: portraits of veiled warriors and representations of architectural structures, mostly in ruins. These forceful images were influenced by his childhood memories and by the 2006 War in Lebanon. Since the early 2000s, he gained tremendous recognition and was exhibited and acclaimed worldwide. In 2022, his monumental installation Janus Gate was featured at the National Pavilion of Lebanon at the Venice Art Biennale.

Le Stade (The Stadium) was executed when the artist was enrolled at ENSAD in Paris. It is one of the very few paintings by Ayman Baalbaki that displays a building that is not destroyed but in the course of construction. It depicts Camille Chamoun Sports City Stadium, a major post-war project that was completed in 1997 in order to host the Pan Arab Games. The original Sports City Stadium, located in the same space, was destroyed on the first day of the Israeli Invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This painting is a testimony of the reconstruction period in the 1990s and somehow a poignant evocation of the lost old stadium and all the destructions of major public structures resulting from the war.