Samia Osseiran Junblatt, a Lebanese artist whose art has always been strongly linked to tragic episodes in her life, has died at the age of 80. The Dalloul Art Foundation in Beirut, which lent one of her works to the recently concluded Venice Biennale, announced the news of her passing on Instagram a few days ago. With her art, characterised by intersecting planes of colour and floating spheres, she sought to assimilate dramatic events that marked her, such as the death of her mother and brother.
As a result, biographical events have intervened sharply in her poetics, marking crucial turning points. For example, the death of her brother in 1972 had led Junblatt to darken her palette, reflecting on mortality and the despair that afflicts those left behind; the death of her mother, in 2007, led her instead to paint flowers as a tribute to the transience of life, in equally poignant but less dramatic tones.
Born in 1944 in the Lebanese city of Sidon, she studied art at a women’s college in Beirut in the mid-1960s, then went to Florence for a master’s degree before returning to the Lebanese capital. For a short time in the mid-1970s, she studied graphic arts in Tokyo. Her work from the 1960s and 1970s confirms the personal way in which she interpreted modernism, which was spreading in Lebanon as in the West. For example, Sunset (1968), the work that was exhibited at the 2024 Biennial, depicts a red sun suspended above a long corridor that leads nowhere. The work confirms the hallmarks of Surrealism, but also refers to typical Lebanese landscapes.
“I love the sunset the most,” the artist wrote in 2016. “Every evening I watch the sun dipping into the sea and I like it best in winter, when the shapes are more varied and beautiful.”
Sunset appeared in a section of the 2024 Venice Biennale dedicated to non-Western abstraction, alongside works by Samia Halaby, Saloua Raouda Choucair, Carmen Herrera, Freddy Rodríguez and Ione Saldanha. This small, independent collective also reflects Junblatt’s commitment and interest in the work of his colleagues. With the aim of revitalising the Lebanese art scene, she also founded an organisation in 1977 to support young artists. A commitment that she will now carry on in her memory.
