Lot
9
Les espérances longuement entretenues
Watercolour, 2020
28 x 38 cm
Estimate
$3 800
In Faraj’s watercolour, eight nude bodies float in dark water. Some hide faces moulded by pain, like damned souls overwhelmed with torments; others embrace each other tenderly. A final figure pleads, in vain, with the callipygian figure rising in the foreground, who casts an anxious gaze toward the viewer. Bathed in twilight with shimmering fluorescent-coloured trees, the scene evokes the chaos of today’s uncertain times, the bursts of fear of total annihilation, and the anxiety that haunts our hope for the future of humanity.
Biographical note
Nadine Faraj is an artist invested in studying healing transformation. In her fluid, torrid, and sometimes humorous watercolours, she explores the plenitude and depths of humanity. Her works deal with social questions such as sexuality, sexual and body positivity, gender equality, anti-racism, and LGBTQI2A+ visibility. She has received reviews of her art in the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, A Woman’s Thing, Le Devoir, La Presse, CBC News, Elephant, Huck, and The Steidz. She holds a BFA from Concordia University (Montréal) and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts (New York). Since 2020, she has been a member of Rizoma, which offers art and poetry workshops to incarcerated women.
Faraj has exhibitions regularly in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. She lives on the unceded Indigenous territories of Tiohtià:ke/Montréal and Manhattan/New York, the guardian peoples of which are, respectively, the Kanien’kehá:ka and the Lenapes.