MOUNIRAH MOSLY (1952 - 2019), RETURN FROM AL FALLUJAH MARKET

signed Mosley in Arabic and signed and dated M Mosley 15.2010 in English (lower left)

ink and mixed media on card-paper

29 by 23.3 cm. 11 ½ by 9 ¾ in.

Framed: 54.2 by 43 cm. 21 ¾ by 17 in.

Executed in 2010.

Born in Mecca in 1954, Mounirah Mosly is considered a pioneer of Saudi modernism and is one of the Kingdom’s first established female artists. Mosly pursued her education internationally at the College of Fine Arts, Cairo, and later received a Master’s degree in Graphic Design in the United States. Her work has addressed political issues, women’s issues and supported the societal role of children’s art, contributing to her recognition as one of the Kingdom’s most celebrated female modernists. Her curiosity and outlook is freely expressed through her works, and her canvases capture layers of the subconscious with her bold styles and colours that incorporate local, experimental materials. In 1968 after her return from the US, Mosly, alongside pioneering female Saudi modernist Safeya Binzagr, co-organised a joint exhibition. Mosly was widely known to have held her own exhibitions in the community which she helped establish on the Eastern shore of the Kingdom, and where audiences international and local gathered around the oil industrial compounds. In 1973, she was the first woman to be granted a solo exhibition in the Municipality of Riyadh. A testament to her artistic prowess, Mosly has exhibited across the Arab world, as well as receiving international recognition. In 1997, she was granted the Order of the Merit by the Lebanese Ministry of Culture, and in 2007 she founded the Art Festival in the city of Al Khobar. She was the first artist from the region to be exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C., in 1987, and again in a further two exhibitions entitled ‘Forces of Change: Artists of the Arab World’ (1994) and ‘Contemporary Arab Women’s Art: Dialogues of the Present’ (1999). Artistically and spiritually ahead of her time, Mosly’s preoccupation with humanitarian concerns and female artistic representation contributed to her indelible mark on the development of modern art in Saudi Arabia and the landscape of female Arab art. She passed away in 2019, aged 67.

Mosly was equipped with an experimental disposition from early on, and this, paired with her enriching studies of and interest in the Arabian Peninsula’s historical culture, enabled a conscious and abundant artistic output. Perched between imagination and reality, modernity and the region’s opulent cultural legacy, Mosly acquired inspiration multifariously, as she describes it, from “the whole universe, in addition to events in the Arab world, nature, human artifacts, poetry, music, and the depth of contemplation of man, existence, and readings.”.

In the present work, Mosly depicts a scene of two figures returning back from the Al Fallujah Market; swathed in robes in various shades of blue, the two figures appear in an embrace. The four hands that traverse the canvas width situate the viewer’s eye, much like a guide while they navigate Mosly’s deft ability to border abstraction and figuration which allows for a wondrous viewing experience.