Ayyam Gallery Beirut is pleased to announce the forthcoming exhibition of painter Asma Fayoumi. Titled The Person Within, this upcoming solo show will feature new work by the prominent Jordanian artist.
A fixture of the Arab art scene since the late 1960s, Fayoumi is best known for her expressionist depictions of women and children amidst ravished, unidentifiable worlds. Often utilizing representations of motherhood as a point of entry for greater investigations of love, loss and survival, she recreates a chaotic realm in which brushwork and color overcome her figures as symbolic indicators.
Peaking out through layers of paint, her subjects reflect a sense of turmoil, as her rapidly executed markings are frantic in nature and cut across the canvas with distressing force. The Person Within will feature a selection of works from 2008 until the present, serving as a chronicle of the artist’s work over the past few years as she projects both introspective and universal themes. Her most recent canvases, produced early this year, reflect a broader take on the institution of family. Frequently impacted by current events and the sociopolitical sphere, Fayoumi has maintained a persistent connection to her surroundings in her work. In these latest paintings we find women and men seeking to shelter their children from a somber environment, their large faces shielding tiny bodies from uncertainty.
Born in Amman, Jordan in 1943, Asma Fayoumi began her career amidst a mid-century school of Syrian abstraction that was lead by the Italian artist and instructor Guido La Regina. A graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, she worked alongside fellow painters Assad Arabi, Faek Dahdouh and Sakher Farzat during a crucial period of the Middle Eastern art scene, when modernist schools first reflected a gradual transition into contemporary modes of representation and a charged political climate prompted artists to take up the call for social change. A well-received solo show in Damascus that created significant buzz solidified her arrival onto the regional stage in 1966. Since then she has been featured in countless solo and group exhibitions both at home and abroad and is acknowledged for having paved the way for subsequent generations of female painters in the Arab World.