Quick Facts
Biography
Zena Assi (born 1974 Tripoli, Lebanon) is a Lebanese Painter. An ALBA Académie libanaise des beaux-arts graduate, Assi lives and works in London and has had several solo exhibitions since 2008 at Alwane Gallery in Beirut, Art Sawa Gallery in Dubai and Al Bareh Gallery in Bahrain. In April 2011, a Christie's auction confirmed her as a rising contemporary artist of international reach.
Ideas and Works
Inspired by Egon Schiele, himself a protégé of Gustav Klimt, Assi's work is about the weight and baggage of civilization on the ordinary person, and the link and dichotomy between the two. It often reflects the situation in Lebanon and addresses the issues of war, peace, silence, hope and individual frustration.
She mainly paints buildings and people. Assi’s sharply defined portraits of still impression elongated and often melancholic figures of young men and women call for attention alongside her cluttered cityscapes that are crammed with wires, television antennas and buildings stacked precariously on top of one another. Her canvasses are filled with interwoven lines set against bold fields of colour abstractions. Lines of varied width and texture swirl rhythmically beyond the picture plane thus echoing the sense of a dynamic energy. Her people have lean and hungry looks and her buildings are scrawny and they stick together with the intensity of amoeba under a microscope. Her works are inspired by the relations and conflicts between the individual and his or her environment, with a focus on the daily lives of Beirut’s citizens.
“to be able to put a city like Beirut on canvas, one should take into consideration the layers of its history and heritage, the complexity of its social organizations, the diversity of its cultures, and the peculiarity of its universality… in an attempt to finally convey the soul and spirit of its cityscapes” – Zena Assi.
Assi works with a variety of media: she uses acrylic, oil, ink or spray cans, collages of found images, and even photocopies and reproductions of her own paintings that she assembles on canvas. She usually does not make preparatory sketches and instead begins by priming her canvases directly. The base layer is created using mixed media followed by adding different textures and materials: tissue paper, cloth, broken brushes to name a few. The result is contrasting layers of thick impasto. Assi often finishes off with a layer of oil colours which give her canvasses their peculiar, vigorous luminosity. Pitch-black colour dominates her works.