Ibrahim Nubani

Born in Acre, 1961. Lives and works in Maker.

In his works, Ibrahim Nubani creates a painterly frame which circumscribes the tension between economically painted colorful geometrical shapes and the more expressively painted monochromatic pictorial space. This tension juxtaposes two different painterly languages, reinforcing the sense of structural transience arising from the works. This is exemplified in Cemetery, painted in 1988, approximately one year after the outbreak of the first Intifada. With its brown frame, this painting appears like a gaping hole when observed from above. The painterly surface eliminates the skyline, whereas sky-blue and soil-brown are inverted. A cypress tree of sorts hovers at the center of the painting, ostensibly demarcating the boundaries of the cemetery, its branches signifying eternal life, mourning, and lamentation. Painted next to the cypress is an entrance door which does not lead to another possible space, but rather sinks in the mud. Three geometrical elements, akin to gravestones, are marked in bright oil paints on the muddy surface—an orange square demarcated by a black contour, a yellow square, and a red circle—signifiers which likewise float in a deadlocked and muddy, expressive painterly sphere.

The sense of entrapment and closure conveyed by the composition is enhanced in works created after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada. In the catalogue of Nubani's exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, curator Efrat Livni pinpointed the turning point in Nubani's work:

The outbreak of the second Palestinian popular uprising (Intifadah) in October 2000, and police brutality at Palestinian-Israeli demonstrations within Israel … erupted volcano-like into Nubani's studio. These developments, coupled with the grim outcome of the violent clashes between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces in the Jenin refugee camp, transformed Nubani's feelings of disenchantment and despair into a rage that demanded expressive outlet.¹

The scream is clearly discernible in the self-portrait Untitled (2004). The painting features a face which is also a landscape, becoming a part of verdant ivy, climbing and penetrating a wide-open mouth which exposes a yellow abyss. Painted in yellow and green, the eyes appear like a spiral. The body itself is cut and fragmented; the arm and shoulder are replaced by a stump, which is likewise akin to a spiral penetrating the torso. Nubani's wounded amputee is voiceless, his eyes are filled with pain, but the scream remains unheard, only echoing in the gaping mouth before us.

In a series of works from the past decade Nubani returns to the image of the labyrinth in which the human figure disappears, and only human signifiers, such as eyes and locks of hair, burst forth from a dead-end geometrical space. In Untitled (2007), a labyrinth of squares generates depth; the tension between the inward motion and the black frame, between revelation and concealment, reinforces the sense of entrapment within the painterly sphere. In another Untitled painting from the same year, the artistic crossing of geometrical abstract with painterly symbolism reaches its culmination. The geometrical surface buries local symbolical elements in the concrete which previously emerged in his works, creating a maze and a trap; a disintegrating, imploding construction which leaves chaos and traces behind.