Maliheh Afnan was born to Persian parents in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine on 24 March 1935. She received her education in Lebanon and the USA before immigrating to London in 1997. Her oeuvre is known for its mixing of calligraphy and painting while addressing themes of exile and displacement.
Artist Maliheh Afnan was born to Persian parents in Haifa, Mandatory Palestine on 24 March 1935. Her great-grandfather was Baháʼu'lláh, a Persian aristocrat who founded the Baháʼí Faith - a 19th-century Abrahamic religion emphasising the spiritual unity of all humankind while promoting world peace and equality – but Afnan herself was not a follower. In 1949, Afnan and her family relocated to Beirut, Lebanon. She earned a BA in Sociology and Psychology from the American University of Beirut in 1955. For her further studies, she moved to the USA and obtained an MA in Fine Arts from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, D.C., in 1962. Afnan then moved to Kuwait and lived there for three years (1963–6) before returning to Beirut (1966–74). She then immigrated to Europe, initially settling in Paris (1974–97) before permanently moving to London in 1997.
Afnan’s oeuvre is characterised by an intricate fusion of textures, scripts, and faded imagery. She used mixed media, including painting and drawing, to create visual narratives that transcend linguistic barriers. Afnan primarily worked on paper, using a colour palette rich in browns, blacks, and reds. Languages, scripture, and calligraphy are integral to her oeuvre, leading to the creation of 'written paintings'. Exposed to Arabic, English, and Hebrew writing from a young age, her works echo the aesthetics of ancient scrolls and tablatures, resonating with antique Roman, Greek, and Persian script aesthetics. She was influenced by her American art teacher and Baháʼí Faith follower, Mark Tobey, whose densely packed compositions blended Abstract Expressionism with Asian calligraphy. Inspiration from artists, Paul Klee, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock, further facilitated the integration of Western painting traditions with Middle Eastern writing systems. Afnan’s use of illegible script, not intended for communication but as a visual element, rendered her work enigmatic yet engaging. The unreadable scripts convey deep emotions and narratives, inviting exploration and stirring the imagination. Afnan also created a series of handmade books, converting texts into visual expressions. Each page, carefully inscribed, reflects her childhood intrigue with numbers and written elements, serving as a visual testament to her early fascinations. Afnan also worked with an expression similar to portraiture which she called ‘personages’: rather than portraying an individual these paintings were a mix of different people she encountered, observed, or imagined.
Themes of belonging, displacement, exile, and identity amid geopolitical unrest are prevalent in her work. Her experiences of Italian air raids on Haifa during the Second World War and the 1948 Arab-Israeli war infused her art. Although Afnan left for Paris before the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil war in 1975, she was deeply affected by the events. The Veiled series, initiated post-9/11, deviates from the anticipated focus on Islamic women’s physical veiling to uncover internal concealments of truth and emotions. These works, featuring ink and gouache writings obscured by smoky-coloured gauze, portray veiled anxieties and intentions with a ghostly delicacy. Titles such as Veiled Melancholia and Nothing to Declare echo the hidden, intricate emotions of exile, unveiling internal landscapes obscured by societal expectations and personal inhibitions. Afnan dismissed easy identifiers such as ‘Middle Eastern Artist’ or ‘Female Artist’, viewing them as circumstantial truths rather than defining characteristics and, instead, preferred the exploration of shared human experiences.
During her 50-year career Afnan exhibited regularly in London and France. Her debut solo show, facilitated by Tobey, was presented at Galerie Claire Brambach, Basel, Switzerland in 1971, followed by a Michel Tapié-organised exhibition at Galerie Cyrus, Paris, in 1974. In London, Afnan presented work in numerous museum and gallery shows, including in Iranian Contemporary Art, Curve Gallery, Barbican Centre, London (2001); British Museum (2007) and the Courtauld Institute of Art (2009). In 2015, just a year before her death, she featured in Susan Steinberg’s documentary Mirrors to Windows: The Artist As Woman which explored the careers of an international group of female artists working in London. Maliheh Afnan died on 6 January 2016 in London, England. In the UK public domain her work is held in collections including the British Museum, London. In 2023 her work featured posthumously in Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70 at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Maliheh Afnan]
Publications related to [Maliheh Afnan] in the Ben Uri Library