Nabil Anani b1943

Nabil Anani is a painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in 1943 in Latroun, Palestine. During the Nakba of 1948, he fled with his family to Halhul, a city in the southern West Bank, where he completed his early education. He graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1969, and in 1989 earned a master's degree in Islamic Archeology at Al-Quds University in Jerusalem. Upon returning to Palestine, he worked as an art teacher at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) at Al Tireh College and the United Nations Training College in Ramallah. Anani co-founded the League of Palestinian Artists in 1973, becoming its director in 1998. In 1994 he was a founding member of the Al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem. Anani taught at Al-Quds University until retiring in 2003, after which point he dedicated much of his time to the League's activities and, in 2006, helped establish the International Academy of Art in Ramallah.

The artist grew up during a critical period in Palestinian history: born during the British Mandate, a childhood shaped by the Nakba and the subsequent Israeli occupation, Anani’s young adulthood occurred in the wake of the Naksa, and his artistic practice matured during the first and second intifadas. Amidst the disappearance of his homeland, he sought comfort in family gatherings and Halhul's hills, vineyards, and old quarters; he also found spiritual relief in the works of his grandfather, Ali Daoud, a Sufi sheikh who presided over the Zawiyah mosque. In Egypt, Anani experienced the 1967 Naksa, also known as the Six-Day War, which led to Israel's further annexation of Palestinian land as well as the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. From early on, Anani worked to form a modern Palestinian national identity with visual narratives rich in folkloric as well as political themes.

Inspired by Palestinian history and visual culture, Anani's work explored themes that promoted national identity through the revival of traditional arts and the expression of collective memory. While in Halhul in 1977, he depicted nostalgic scenes from pastoral and village life. Moving into abstraction, he recreated family porch gatherings against a floral background in In Front of Our House (1986), which features allusions to crucial pieces of Palestinian material culture like embroidery and pottery.

The theme of the motherland has been central to Anani's iconography since his early career. Motherhood I (c. 1976) portrays a mother wearing a red embroidered dress and embracing her child, the trellis of green grapevines in the background framing a black halo around her white veil. Explicitly adopting the colors of the Palestinian flag as one of the many elements of resistance, this work is an allegory of Palestine, the mother, the source of nourishment and shelter for her people. Anani reproduced his paintings as posters that served the Palestinian cause while preserving visual history.

During the First Intifada (1987-1993), Anani, along with artists Sliman Mansour, Vera Tamari, and Tayseer Barakat, established the New Vision Movement as an innovative approach to Palestinian artmaking. They boycotted Israeli products and instead used natural materials from their homeland, simultaneously emphasizing their connection to the Palestinian soil and avoiding the purchase of art supplies from Israel. Anani chose leather as support to stretch, cut, and paint on, and used it to make abstract shapes that he mounted on wood and tinted with henna, tea, and turmeric. Though his practice has since re-incorporated manmade materials, it continues to honor the history and heritage of his native Palestine. In 2007, for example, the artist produced a series of watercolor paintings inspired by early Islamic miniatures. Within geometric shapes, he integrated calligraphic Quranic verses, texts, collaged copies of Ottoman documents, and official seals to critically examine the history of the region.

In his recent works, Anani revisits his most celebrated theme of the Palestinian motherland, expressed literally with images of landscapes and allegorically through the figure of the woman. His work  Palestinian Icon (2010) portrays a large woman in an embroidered dress of vibrant green, red, and pink, carries Jerusalem on her arm, grapes in her hand, and villagers throughout her dress. The embroidery, or Tatreez, that embellishes her clothing is of considerable significance to Palestinian cultural heritage. Traditionally, the colors and patterns indicate the maker's village of origin, and the artisanal form as a whole has come to symbolize Palestinian national pride and cultural continuity in the face of adversity. 

Along with his lifelong friend and colleague Suleiman Mansour, Anani was appointed by the Society of Inash Al Usra, an Al Bireh-based civil society organization, to research Palestinian visual heritage in the 1980s. The two visited several villages to study traditional Tatreez, and these traditional patterns and motifs have held particular significance in Anani's work ever since.

Palestinian Icon (2010) is in conversation with other images by Anani that feature the Palestinian landscape, including fertile olive groves, where vivid greens contrast against white limestone fences and square houses as symbols of national identity and resilience. His scattered strokes of red terrains, violet hills, and pink trees have a post-Impressionistic quality that evokes alternating feelings of restlessness and serenity. Breathing new life into his practice, Anani produced the series Life Before 1948 (2014), which reconstructed the past and visualized a hopeful future by appropriating old family photographs. He painted characters whose strikingly colored outfits contrasted their expressionless faces. The artist also turned more explicitly to political work in Qalandia Checkpoint (2014), where he depicted the brutal restrictions placed on Palestinian mobility at one of Israel's most infamous checkpoints.

Anani lives with his wife in Ramallah, where he continues to produce stirring works that call for national liberation through coded iconography.