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#AfifaAleiby
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"Let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing."
-- Khalil Gibran
#KhalilGibran #soul #reason #passion #singing #exaltation #poems #books #literature #life #love #death #AfifaAleiby
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As if viewed from overhead, a young woman reclines on a thin red blanket. Her long, dark hair fans out and her skin is painted in smooth, pale tones, with softly shadowed cheeks and a small mouth. She wears a heavy deep-blue coat dress with oversized brown lapels and large buttons, revealing a green-and-white striped interior. A thin gold chain holds a small heart-shaped pendant resting on her chest as a single hoop earring glints at one ear. Her right hand rests over her midsection, while her left arm lifts lightly, fingers relaxed, toward a tan tambourine set beside her. Scattered playing cards of hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds spill across the red surface near her elbow. On either side, vertical bands of green, leaf-like patterning frame the scene, intensifying a quiet, enclosed mood. Painted in 2010, this portrait turns “rest” into a kind of aftermath as the tambourine may suggest music, dance, and public performance, while the cards might hint at chance, risk, and the ways identity can be treated like a game to be read from symbols. The title’s use of the word “Gypsy” carries a long history of stereotyping Roma and other traveling peoples, but Iraqi artist Afifa Aleiby’s (عفيفة لعيبي) figure is not depicted as spectacle. Her unfocused gaze and unguarded pose hint at fatigue, contemplation, or a pause between acts rather than a role to be consumed. Aleiby, born in Basra and trained in Baghdad before studying monumental art in Moscow, has lived much of her life in exile, later teaching in Aden and eventually settling in the Netherlands. That transnational life, along with her interest in blending echoes of Renaissance painting, icon-like stillness, and social realism, often centers the female body as an image where beauty, politics, and belonging meet. Here, saturated red and protective green borders feel like a threshold between private refuge and the outside world, inviting us to consider who gets to name a woman, and what it means to let her simply be.
“Gypsy Girl at Rest” by عفيفة لعيبي / Afifa Aleiby (Iraqi) - Oil on canvas / 2010 - Contemporary Art Platform (Kuwait City, Kuwait) #WomenInArt #WomensArt #WomanArtist #WomenArtists #AfifaAleiby #عفيفةلعيبي #Aleiby #ContemporaryArt #ContemporaryArtPlatform #BlueskyArt #artText #WomenPaintingWomen
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