FRIEZE MASTERS 2026

‘The presentation marks the gallery’s first dedicated presentation of Afnan’s work since 2016 and comes at a moment of renewed institutional attention to her practice with recent acquisitions by the The Courtauld Gallery and Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and work currently on view in the permanent collections at Tate Modern.’ Asmaa Al-Shabibi

Born in Haifa, Palestine, to a family of Persian descent, Afnan lived and worked across the Middle East, Europe and the United States eventually settling in London. Her experience of displacement and exile, and her position between Arab, Persian and Western cultural traditions, informed a practice concerned with memory and place and the traces left by personal and collective histories. Working across painting, drawing and mixed media, Afnan developed a distinctive visual language in which layers of text, calligraphic forms, fragmented figures and worn surfaces evoke the passage of time and the instability of memory. Her works often occupy a space between legibility and abstraction, transforming personal and cultural references into complex, atmospheric compositions that resist a single reading.

The booth highlights the development of her practice from the 1970s to the 1990s: we are particularly pleased to include a rare 1970s work from her Torched series, paintings on cardboard made in response to the Lebanese Civil War, together with select portraits, Personnages , that were the subject of her 2019 solo at the MAN Museum Sardinia.

‘Frieze Masters offers an opportunity to reconsider Afnan’s singular contribution to post-war art and to place her practice within a broader international art-historical context. It continues Lawrie Shabibi’s longstanding commitment to bringing greater visibility to underrepresented female artists from the Middle East and to place them within the context of dominant modern and contemporary art narratives.’ William Lawrie