Mon 05 July 2021:
Google’s latest Doodle featured renowned Palestinian-born artist Maliheh Afnan on Monday.
Maliheh Afnan, considered by many as one of the most important Middle Eastern artists of the 20th century. Afnan’s used mixed media in her “written paintings” and works, which are mostly inspired by archaeological scrolls.
She explores themes of exile and displacement alongside Middle Eastern conflicts and her own cultural heritage.
This day in 2020 marked the last day of a group exhibition of Afnan’s 1979 piece ‘Wartorn’ which took place virtually as part of ‘The Symmetry of Fragility’ series in Milan’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, Google explained on its Doodle page.
The artist was born in 1935 in Haifa, Palestine, to Persian parents. Afnan and her parents later moved to Beirut, where she attended high school and received her Bachelors of Art at the American University in Beirut.
She moved to Washington DC in 1956, where she received her Masters of Arts in Fine Arts at the Corcoran School of Art in 1962.
Afnan lived in Kuwait between 1963 and 1966, and later moved to Beirut where she stayed until the civil war forced her to leave in 1974. She spent the next 23 years in Paris and had numerous exhibitions before moving to London in 1997.
Afnan’s interest in written language developed when she was a child as she used to scribble imaginary text and numbers on pages, developing a distinct style of abstract calligraphy.
The artist had her first solo art exhibition in Europe in 1971, which marked the beginning of a successful 50-year career. She returned to Beirut, Lebanon in 1974 before the civil war forced her to leave the country, eventually moving to Paris before settling in London by 1997, where she was laid to rest in 2016.
Afnan’s collections can be found in galleries across Europe and the Middle East and in New York’s renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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