Fouad Agbaria, the veteran artist who moves between Musmus and Umm al-Fahm, presents virtuoso paintings along with thin iron installations and the installation ‘Sabra’ that he prepared especially for the exhibition at the Givat Haviva Shared Art Gallery. Agbaria, who also moves between identities and affiliations, invites viewers to meander through his roots.
Agbaria explores his past with his hands: the rough textures he scooped from
the soil, which he still cultivates today, are placed on the canvas in a way that
brings his realistic and fantastical paintings to life. The wild and charged
landscape of his childhood changed throughout his life and gave rise to
difficult feelings of disappointment, frustration, and emotional detachment,
which he translated into art that sends out roots in all directions, clinging and
being uprooted, intertwining and letting go.
The motif of roots appears in all of his works, as a symbol that seeks to be
embedded in national, familial, and agricultural soil, but is torn away and
reveals prominent,
sensual, and aggressive living roots that connect him to his father and mother,
to childhood memories and culture, and to the uprooting to which he clings.
Agbaria grows cactus hedges and produces stems, forcing proximity on plants
that did not choose to come close, and reviving ideas born in his orchard
located not far from the separation wall. This severance of the space and the
fabric of life is expressed in large paintings, rich in strokes of color, that will fill
the gallery walls, ranging from anger to lyricism and longing. At the center of
the space will stand the living model, a cactus whose exposed, torn roots will
suck up liquid, part water, part blood, from an artificial source; in this way, the
cactus will continue to exist and breathe even outside its natural environment,
resuscitated by the artist.
For the first time, Agbaria’s carpets also undergo a metamorphosis: after
painting countless embroidered Palestinian carpets, this time they too become
metal installations, laser-cut, with their colorful threads hiding behind them
and reminiscent of the familiar order of things. These carpets, which have lost
the softness of the fabric, also tell his story and send roots back to his
personal and national biography.
Names of the works: ‘The Memorial Stand’, ‘Blind in His Homeland’, ‘Between Heaven and Earth’
