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Best Painting - 2022
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Zena Assi
(Co-Winner)
Zena Assi
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Part of Kan Ya Makan: Tales, Myths, and Legends. Mixed Media on Canvas, 180x220 |
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From a distance, the chaotic medley of shapes and patterns greets the eye with a semi-homogenous fabric. A closer inspection reveals that the kaleidoscopic composition is full of visual surprises, with subjects and objects that show themselves at regular spacial intervals. Inspired by the interactions and clashes between people and their surroundings, society and environment, multidisciplinary artist Zena Assi narrates the ebb and flow of modern day city life.
Popping Art
The elaborate design is intricate with repetitive botanical and floral patterns in muted earthy tones. Many of the leaves and petals are overlaid with natural and animal prints. Every now and then, these interlaced motifs are punctuated with a smiling face, a gun wielding soldier, a bird, a plane or even a cartoon character. The artwork merges the classical neutrality of still life paintings with the products of pop culture, rendered in stencil-stamp style.
Web of Lives
The cultural subjects disrupt the ‘natural’ backdrop, but even that has lost its biological aesthetic. Assi has stylized the plants and flowers to the point that they become hyperbolic versions of their true form, leading them subtly into surrealist territory. The composition is a thematic play on dualities. “I am interested in creating fantastic worlds filled with odd juxtapositions,” says Assi. These binaries are often referenced in her other works, but are especially palpable in ‘Wallpaper’: The child and the adult, the tangible and the imagined, the chaotic and the disciplined. Like a tapestry of a family tree that has unraveled and reassembled in a jumbled net, there is no coherent timeline, no beginning, no end, and no borders. In a symbolic illustration of contemporary daily life, she depicts the anxieties caused by the inundation of information and stimuli coming from every direction and our subsequent retention of it. The painting is an invitation to pause, observe and introspect, and Assi calls on the subconscious to surface and shape its own history.
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