Zena Assi

Themes that are central to her vision include present-day issues related to countries in the Middle East as they battle with internal strife and civilian unrest.

Assi's use of pallid colors, jagged angular outlines and intricate layering, imbues inanimate objects, landscapes and buildings, with the emotional burdens of their inhabitants.

In installation pieces like ‘Bullet points’ or ‘Beirut 1X1’, the artist collaborates with the architect Issam Barhouch to tackle local Lebanese controversial topics and try to redefine them outside normal boundaries.

Either in 2D paintings on canvas or 3D big scale sculptures, her characters are so immersed in that urban habitat that they start up being covered with it until they become part of it, the slogans and facades written on their skin, the infrastructure almost replacing their bones.

“Assi’s roughly chiselled portraits of rakish figures –lanky young men sucking down coffee and cigarettes, despondent young women sinking stubborn chins into thin, bony hands –jostled for attention alongside her paintings of dystonic cityscapes cluttered with electrical wires, television antennae and buildings stacked precariously on top of one another”... ”She never makes preparatory sketches and begins instead by priming her canvases directly.

She creates base layers with acrylic paints and then starts adding different textures, using paper, cloth, broken brushes, whatever she finds in her studio to suit her mood”[1] Through the big paintings’ collection of bouquets on canvas, titled ‘PUT IT IN A TIN’, Zena addresses a contemporary universal issue of our definition of the natural environment nowadays: is the modern world still visible by its surface?

The artist then takes control of the process, by stretching the canvasses on a wooden frame, looking for forms that appear through the layers, like shadowy memories of the past, and finally outlining them to create her bouquets planted in a coffee, tea, ketchup or soup tin.

Hidden among the flowers are a variety of other forms such as soldiers, emojis, birds, animals, words and numbers that reflect what is happening in our daily life.

Other elements of the décor are nevertheless disturbing; the recurring presence of advertising billboards and posters for consumer products, luxury items, or big companies of the Net, emphasizes that despite the situation, life goes on and trade resumes its rights…’[2] 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.