Untitled

Born 1934, Jaffa, Palestine · Died 2005, Beirut

Seraphim, the eldest of four children, grew up amid orange groves and white, sandy beaches by the Mediterranean Sea. During the 1948 Palestinian exodus (Al-Nakba), her family sought refuge in Lebanon. Only 14 years old at the time, the artist was deeply affected by this forced migration. Four years later, she began working for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Beirut. However, the colors and sensations of her childhood as well as the memory of her grandfather, who was an architect and art enthusiast, remained with her. Camille Aboussouan, a family friend and lawyer, persuaded her to take up painting and began to educate her in the arts, philosophy, and history. Seraphim studied with Lebanese painter Jean Khalifeh, then enrolled at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA). In 1959 she spent a year in Florence and a subsequent twelve months in Madrid on a scholarship grant. She often described her paintings as attempts to depict her dreams, and her work took on Surrealist overtones. Seraphim went on to represent Lebanon in three international biennials: Alexandria (1962), Paris (1963), and São Paulo (1965).

Widely recognised today for her surrealist-inflected portraits, the artist also ventured into the language of abstraction. This painting, with its subtle accents of grey and white, created at the very beginning of her career, offers a glimpse into that early experimentation.