NABIL ANANI - Palestinian Artist

Nabil Anani is one of the most prominent Palestinian artists working today, born in Latroun in 1943. After graduating in Fine Arts from Alexandria University, Egypt in 1969, Anani returned to the occupied Palestinian territory and began a fruitful career as an artist and a teaching mentor at the UN training college in Ramallah. He is considered as a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement. He held his first exhibition in Jerusalem in 1972 and has since exhibited widely in Europe, North America, the Middle East, North Africa and Japan – both as an individual artist and with groups of his Palestinian contemporaries.
Anani is a multi-talented artist, for he is a painter, a ceramicist and a sculptor. He pioneered the use of local media such as leather, henna, natural dyes, Papier-mâché, wood, beads and copper. Over the past four decades, he built an impressive catalogue of outstanding, innovative and unique art. Anani was awarded the first Palestinian National Prize for Visual Art in 1997 and became the head of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1998. Much of Anani’s work focuses on the symbolism of the olive tree, a major component of Palestine’s landscape. For him, the destruction of the olive tree by Israeli forces parallels the plight of the people living under the occupation.