“The images in my paintings come from deep within me; they are surreal and unexplainable. Consciously I want to portray a woman’s world and how important love is to a woman. Few men understand the quality of love a woman seeks. I try to show them.”
Juliana Séraphim was born in Jaffa in 1934. After being forced to flee to Lebanon at the age of fourteen, Séraphim became swept up in the burgeoning metropolitan culture of Beirut, the thriving visual arts of which owed much to the prolific activity of women artists. During the 1950s, she began to pursue painting under the tutelage of artist Jean Khalifé, a pioneer of Lebanese abstraction, and soon went on to study across Europe at the Academy of Replica Handbags Florence and at its Parisian counterpart, as well as at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid. It was here that Séraphim began to employ her recognisable oil painting technique, and her distinctive compositions began to attract critical praise for their dreamlike qualities. Utilising her craft as a platform for revelation and self-discovery, she channelled her emancipated imagination through the untethered vessel of Surrealism. Inspired by her sensorial childhood experiences along the Mediterranean shore, Séraphim’s intricate, ethereal compositions are a simulation of her very own utopian world, much like the works of British-Mexican Surrealist Leonora Carrington. Séraphim celebrates womanhood and sensitivity as empowering qualities; in this way, her life is inseparable from her art.
Upon her return to Beirut, it was her appearance at the Sursock Museum’s inaugural Salon d’Automne in 1961 that catalysed her professional career. Séraphim has since been represented by renowned institutional collects ions globally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. In 2024, her works featured in various international exhibitions and art fairs, including Arab Presence: Modern Art and Decolonization: Paris 1908 – 1988, at Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris (5 April - 25 August 2024) and at Frieze Masters in London with Richard Saltoun Gallery, forming the artist’s first solo presentation in the UK.
