Jane Gemayel, the Canadian artist who lives and works in Monaco, will hold her first Dubai-based exhibition with a retrospective selection of her works, in the Monaco Pavilion at Expo on 12th and 13th January 2022, operated by cultural event managers Grimaldi Forum Monaco. 

Born in Ontario, Canada, Jane discovered at a very young age a life-long passion for books, dictionaries and a boundless love of words. At the age of 20, Jane discovered and decoded the work of poet and visual artist Kahlil Gibran, which has given meaning to the way she approaches life and work ever since, drawing a path through art, literature and today’s mass media news.

 “There was a charm like beauty that appealed to me, regardless of religious beliefs, it brought and still brings harmony and peace – a source of rationality in an irrational world” said Gemayel. 

In 2015, Jane Gemayel published a bespoke illustrated edition of Gibran’s seminal work The Prophet. The choice of illustrating the writings of Kahlil Gibran is a response to the aesthetic research that the artist bases on the depiction of the human, preferably female, body in search of an ideal beauty. 

Imbued with a classical heritage that she shares with the masters who inspired her, such as Matisse and Klimt, Jane records the movement of a body in black ink, with a sure and spontaneous line. Within the drawing, the sense of movement is rendered through the use of arabesque motifs and dense lines executed with this medium deposited with energy, in the manner of a calligrapher who fills the space before him. But these sacred bodies and this formal beauty convey other symbolic values where it is a question of the fragility of life and of the soul. Her work is the fruit of a long meditation on the world. The Black Boxes bear witness to this: these intimate boxes in which the artist meticulously collects all the substance of her work: quotations, press cuttings, notes, associations of ideas and colors – images charged with contained emotion. 

The Woman, Heart, Innocence series extends this emotion with astonishing simplicity. The drawings stress these female silhouettes whose faces are little by little going to empty themselves of expression, to hide their identity to the point of arriving at iconographic signs that highlight a universe inviting one to meditation and serenity.

With the News as Muse series, from 2016, Jane Gemayel’s work takes a turn. The written word and the image remain the starting point, but here random articles and photographs from The New York Times are appropriated and drawn over to produce a unique combination of news and art, bringing a documentary value to her drawing without it becoming an illustration.  The artist questions our relationship with power and politics, wonders about the future of mankind and our planet, and denounces the loss of the values that are so dear to her heart: love, tolerance, peace and freedom. What was a poetic and spiritual celebration in The Prophet becomes pain and condemnation…  These female figures are still present, but their faces, vectors of emotion, are now animated by an incisive look. 

These works are the view of a woman artist on her time.  Denouncing the suffering and the signs of change in our world through the prism of drawing: this is a way of remaking Le Monde – the world – with the underlying hope of perhaps saving it. 

EXHIBITION DETAILS:

Jane Gemayel will be exhibiting in the VIP lounge of the Monaco Pavilion at EXPO 2020, from Wednesday 12th to Thursday 13th January 2022. The Pavilion is in the Opportunity District and will be accessible to the public. 

For further details on the on exhibition and on Jane’s work, please visit: www.janegemayel.com or contact  laetitia@story-pr.com / (+971 56 724 2154)