Regarded as one of the most significant Middle-Eastern artists of the 20th century, Maliheh Afnan is known for her self-described 'written paintings' which reflect upon her Palestinian heritage, as well as themes of displacement, exile and migration in relation to geopolitical conflict.
Read MoreAfnan was born in Haifa to Iranian parents. Seeking refuge from the war in Palestine, Afnan and her family moved to Beirut in 1949. She gained a BA from the American University of Beirut in 1955, and in the following year moved to the United States to pursue further study in art. In 1962, Afnan graduated with an MA in Fine Arts from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Following her graduation, Afnan spent time travelling and lived in Kuwait, Beirut, and Paris from the 1960s through to the 1990s. During these years, Lebanon's Civil War forced Afnan to move from Beirut to Paris. In 1997 Afnan moved to London, where she lived until her death in 2016.
Afnan's works possess a poetic sensitivity evidenced in their intimate scale, subdued natural tones, meditative mark-making and use of delicate materials such as gauze and paper. Influenced by historic and cultural sources including Persian miniatures, Persian and Arabic calligraphy and ancient manuscripts, Afnan references the visual language of these artefacts in reinterpretations of personal histories and material exploration.
After completing her MA in Washington, Afnan sought the tutelage of American abstract painter Mark Tobey, who mentored Afnan and was instrumental in organising her first exhibition in Europe in 1971. Tobey's approach to painting is visibly reflected in Afnan's practice, with works such as Untitled (1969) and Wartorn (1979) constructed with dense, expressive marks in cool, restrained palettes. Similarly, Silent Witness (1979) is comprised of ghostly abstract forms sprawling across the corrugated cardboard surface in the 'all-over painting' style Tobey was associated with.
Afnan was driven by a spontaneous, intuitive process, often beginning with a line and subsequently allowing her subconscious to guide the image, along with the materiality of her medium—whether ink, gouache, oil stick, pencil or collage. She has stated: 'Often the source of these lines stem from scripts—scripts of all kinds, even invented ones... At times landscapes emerge instead, or faces. In a way I find I "write" my painting. I add pigment, layer over layer, which I rub in with my fingers, working it until it assumes its patina. If all of one's life is registered in the recesses of the unconscious, then one's work might simply be an unravelling, filtered and transformed through time and the need to give it form... the process eludes me, and retains its mystery.'
Alongside abstract works, Maliheh Afnan produced portraits and figurative works, which she describes as, 'anonymous figments of my imagination, based on all the faces I have seen in my life. Curiously, they are all male and almost always old. They seem to wear a map of their lives on their faces.' Rendered as simplified pale sketches, their faces share the same ambiguous expression—a vacant, sorrowful gaze, as seen in The Founder (1990) and Eminence Grise II (1995).
In 2019, an exhibition of Afnan's work titled Personnages was presented at the MAN_Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro in Italy. Bringing together years of the artist's figurative Personnages series, the collection examined ideas of diasporic identity and displacement.
Afnan's later works show an increasing use of textile collage and distinctive abstract calligraphy. In Nothing to Declare (2007), the image of a suitcase is formed through the piecing together of strips of gauze; in Veiled Nonsense (2009), a sheet of endless illegible lines of ink script is overlaid with a piece of gauze.
Afnan's acclaimed Veiled series was started after 9/11, as international media attention on hijabs escalated. Symbolically using gauze to represent 'veiling' as 'concealing'—of truth, agendas, emotions and other subjects, Afnan composes tensions between visibility and erasure; truth and fiction; expression and suppression.
The typically smaller scale of the Veiled works encourages an intimate viewing proximity in order to recognise the proliferation of details and imagined cursive script within her compositions, which can at first appear as fine abstract marks. Evocative of palimpsests or wax tablets, which are worked and reworked to bear new texts with traces of previous workings visible, Afnan's paintings seek to reflect upon experiences from the artist's conflict-laden migratory life. The parchment-like treatment of the paper recalls ancient scrolls and manuscripts; Afnan's contemporary iterations can be seen as symbolic of dispossession or exile.
Afnan's practice is the subject of numerous books, including Maliheh Afnan: Traces, Faces and Places (2010) and Familiar Faces (2013).
Maliheh Afnan has presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the 1960s.
Select solo exhibitions include Personnages, MAN_Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro, Sardinia (2019); Tracing Memories, Art Dubai Modern, Dubai (2016); Tonight, the Door Towards Words Will be Opened, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2014); Speak Memory, Rose Issa Projects, London (2013); Traces, Faces, Places, Rose Issa Projects, London (2010); Selected Works 1960-2006, England & Co, London (2006); Maliheh Afnan: Retrospective, England & Co, London (2000).
Select group exhibitions include Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s, Grey Art Gallery, New York (2020); The symmetry of fragility, Fondazione ICA Milano, Milan (2020); A la plume, au pinceau, au crayon: dessins du monde Arabe, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris (2019); A Century in Flux, Sharjah Art Museum, UAE (2018-19); Abu Dhabi Art, with Lawrie Shabibi, Abu Dhabi (2015); Cologne Fine Art, with Galerie Kornfeld, Cologne (2015); Paper Plains, Galerie Kornfeld, Berlin (2014); Asemic, Cultuurcentrum Brugge, Bruges (2014); The Blue Route: Journeys and Beauty from the Mediterranean to China, Boghossian Foundation, Brussels (2013); Hope Map, Cultuurcentrum Brugge, Bruges (2013).
Afnan's work is held in major international collections including the Written Art Foundation, Frankfurt; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The British Museum, London; Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris; and the Akram Ojjeh Foundation, Paris.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2022
