Recently, we wrote about Fragmenta, a remarkable project in which 49 artists and designers transformed discarded stone from the Najem Group factory, giving these fragments a second life. Seeing the works they created left us deeply inspired, and it sparked our curiosity to look more closely at artists who make stone their medium.

Lebanon, in particular, holds a separate universe of creatives engaging with stone in strikingly different ways. Here, we begin with five names — but this is only a starting point. The list will certainly grow.

Najla El Zein moves in stone with the sensibility of a poet. Her work negotiates the intimate and the architectural, the body and the monument. Born in Beirut and based in Amsterdam, she often sculpts in naturally grounded materials — stone, clay, plaster—finding in their imperfection a voice.

One of her more public gestures is 6.07, a response to the Beirut explosion (named for the time, 6:07). In that series, she carved sculptural fragments that seem embattled — abraded, fragile, tentative, yet insistently present. Her forms lean, warp, break, yet demand to be touched.

Her Us, Her, Him installation (2022, Doha) is another anchor. Made of Lebanese limestone, the forms speak of bodies in relation and displacement. She resists pure monumentality; instead, she sculpts in dialogue with voids, hollows, and the negative spaces that frame presence. The solidity of the stone in her hands becomes something porous and emotional.

Richard Yasmine moves fluidly between design and sculptural practice, and in his stone work, fragments and offcuts are not concealed but celebrated. His series Flowing Fragments (2021) consists of sixteen marble pieces, each sculpted and suspended between presence and absence, and each accompanied by its leftover — a silent witness to the act of creation. The collection was never about wholeness, but about the beauty of what flows through and beyond form. By pairing an object with its residue, Yasmine transforms what might have been dismissed as waste into a central part of the narrative. His vocabulary echoes arches and voids, mass and emptiness, staging a dialogue between what is solid and what is lost.

In Divine Decadence (2025), Yasmine turned to marble vessels, candlesticks, and bowls, adorned with steel spikes and delicate organza flowers. The dialogue is almost contradictory: hard permanence meets fragile ornament, a celebration of tension.

And of course, it is impossible to overlook the LAV series, which Yasmine himself describes as having “a main target: an emotional rehabilitation from the war impact.”

We can’t say that Tara Jane Tabet’s main focus is stone, but we were so struck by what she created during Fragmenta that we felt compelled to include her here.

Gregory Gatserelia said about her work on Fragmenta’s piece: “She was spending days on site, working under the heat, cutting piece by piece, and building her work. She was completely immersed in the process, with such a clear vision. I was truly impressed — not only by the result, but also by her dedication and her presence.”

In Fragmenta, Tabet carved directly on site, shaping every piece by hand in a process described as “birth-like” — intimate, physical, and slow. Her objects balance raw edges with minimal interventions, their geometric cuts making the stone feel at once monumental and tender.

And have you seen her works made from upcycled cement bricks? They are stunning. As Tara writes, "This collection reflects everything I’ve learned so far."

Bassam Kyrillos is a sculptor whose practice often hovers between ruin and renewal. His pieces are grounded in the urban fabric of Lebanon — he has worked with stone, concrete, earth, and metal, translating the architecture of destruction into objects that carry both trauma and resilience.

Look at his Beirut Towers, marked by destruction and wounds. Their fractured surfaces speak of pain and endurance, while the forms themselves hold memory and resilience. Kyrillos shows how the scars of ruin remain, quietly shaping both individual lives and collective identity.

Tarek Elkassouf works stone like one composes music. His sculptures in limestone and basalt feel less like heavy objects than time made visible. In Transformative Energy — a monumental work at Jubail Island in Abu Dhabi — he lifts multiple six pillars, carved from limestone and basalt, arranged so their shadows shift and overlap across the mangroves. The cool smoothness of limestone meets the rougher, crystallised texture of basalt, creating a tactile tension between surface and depth.

He also dedicated an entire exhibition to stone: The Future Is Near, a body of work exploring the stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Each piece translates an emotional state into material form with such precision that you feel yourself moving through those stages simply by looking at the works.

We spoke with Tarek in detail about every piece from the show — you can read the full conversation here.