01 Painting, Middle East Artists, with Footnotes, #29

LAILA SHAWA, b. 1940, Palestinian

THE WELL, 1987

Oil on board

80 by 50 cm.; 31½ by 19⅝ in.

Private collection

“The first painting made in Beirut not long after the devastating June war and the only known work of this type from 1967, The Well forgoes all allusion to landscape in favour of a hot expansive background of reds and yellows. Beneath the disc of a searing sun..." More on this work

Laila Shawa (Born Gaza 1940) graduated summa cum laude in Fine Arts from the Italian Accademia di Belle Arti in 1964 and received a diploma in plastic arts from the Accademia San Giacomo in Rome. From 1965 to 1967, she returned to Gaza to teach arts and crafts to underprivileged children. She now lives and works in London. As a Palestinian artist, Shawa’s concern is to reflect the political realities of her country, becoming, in the process, a chronicler of events. Her work is based on a heightened sense of realism and targets injustice and persecution wherever their roots may be.

Her work has been exhibited in Italy, Germany, Austria, and the United Kingdom, in most Arab countries, North Africa, Iraq, Russia, China, Japan, Malaysia and USA. She is represented in public and private collections across the world, including the National Galleries of Jordan and Malaysia, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, the British Museum in London and the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Her work is currently on tour in Brazil, in the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil’s exhibition Isla, the first major exhibition of Islamic Art in Brazil.

Shawa’s multi-media pieces have spanned four decades. As someone who has a close proximity to her native Palestine’s politics, her analysis and documentation of events there is at the core of her work. For that, it is in strength that she is known for her “uncompromising documentation of events of today’s Middle East.”  More on Laila Shawa

Please visit my other blogs: Art Collector, Mythology, Marine Art, Portrait of a Lady, The Orientalist, Art of the Nude and The Canals of Venice, Middle East Artists, and visit my Boards on Pinterest

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