Renowned Lebanese artist Samia Osseiran Junblatt, who has died aged 80, used painting as a way to respond to events in her personal life. The Beirut-based Dalloul Art Foundation, which loaned one of her works to the just-concluded Venice Biennale, announced the news of her death on Instagram last week.
Oseland Jumblatt digests the space age, the deaths of her mother and brother, and more in her art. Intersecting planes of color and floating spheres are recurring elements in her work, which has been exhibited extensively in Lebanon.
Born in the Lebanese city of Sidon in 1944, she studied art at a women’s college in Beirut in the mid-1960s, then went to Florence to study for a master’s degree before returning to the Lebanese capital again. Briefly, in the mid-1970s, she studied graphic arts in Tokyo.
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Her work from the 1960s and 1970s confirms her studies of Lebanese and Western modernism. Sunset Her work “” (1968), which appeared at the 2024 Biennale, features a red sun suspended above a long corridor that leads to nowhere. The work embodies the hallmarks of Surrealism while also referencing scenes seen in Lebanon.
“I like sunsets best,” she said in 2016. “Every night I watch the sun sink into the sea. I like sunsets in winter the most, when the sun’s shapes are more diverse and beautiful.”
Sunset Appearing at the 2024 Venice Biennale in a section dedicated to transcending Western abstraction, it also features works by Samia Halaby, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Carmen Herrera, Freddy Rodríguez and Ione Saldanha, who all make their debuts in this year’s legendary exhibition Appearance.
Osseiran Junblatt then changed a lot in tone depending on what she was thinking at the time. The death of her brother in 1972 triggered a period of darkness and contemplation of death, while the death of her mother in 2007 prompted her to begin painting flowers as a tribute to the fleeting nature of life.
In addition to her own paintings, Osseiran Junblatt focused on the practices of others, founding an artists’ organization in 1977 in the hope of stimulating the art scene in southern Lebanon, where she spent much of her career.
