Gallery Links
Anna Zorina Gallery, New York
McBride Contemporain, Montréal
Joyce Yahouda Gallery, Montreal
Nadine Faraj makes watercolour paintings with raunchiness, humor, tenderness and soul. She paints portraits and sexualized figures in varying degrees of abstraction often drawn from the worlds of pornography and erotica. Her fluid style allows her figures to emerge as deeply psychological and emotional beings, with a full sense of their humanity. Recently, her works have addressed issues of human rights, LGBTQI activism, feminisms and sex and body positivity.
Faraj is represented by McBride Contemporain in Montréal and Anna Zorina Gallery in New York City where she recently presented her exhibition Get Used To Us (2019). Faraj's other solo exhibitions include: Ages Ago Every Cell In Your Soul Capsized Forever Into This Infinite Golden Sea, (2019) SPRING/BREAK Art Show, NYC; Naked Revolt, Anna Zorina Gallery (2016); The Whole World Has Gone Joyously Mad (2016), and Miel Salé (2013) at Galerie Joyce Yahouda in Montreal; and Beacon/Phare at Articule Gallery in Montreal (2010). Her work was included in SVA Galleries’ Believing You, NY (2020); McBride contemporain’s Salon des refusés, Montreal (2020); A.I.R. Gallery’s CURRENTS: Abortion, New York (2018); G.R.O.S.S. at Never Apart in Montreal (2017); Radical Love: Female Lust at Crypt Gallery in London, UK (2017); and The Dubai International Art Symposium, UAE (2008). Faraj completed her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2015), and her BFA at Concordia University in Montreal (2002).
Her paintings were featured on the cover of A Woman’s Thing Magazine (NY), as well as in Hyperallergic, Huffington Post (US/UK), Elephant Magazine (UK), Huck Magazine (UK), Art F City (NY), CBC News (Canada), La Presse and Le Devoir (Quebec, Canada), Gulf News (UAE) and The Steidz (France).
“I own my body.
That is what each of Nadine Faraj’s paintings declare. It is a loud and a proud declaration that looks you in the eye and dares you to shame it. I am shameless, it taunts and promises at the same time. You might own the gaze but the glorious bodies you are looking at own the pride.
I own my body. Not the state, the street or the home, not the temple. I insist on desire, pleasure and sex on my own terms, each of her subjects states. Hear the defiance that grounds each of the portraits.
Sex is chaos and liberation and joy. Nadine Faraj dares you to stand in that chaos and understand why it upends you so. Her colours and the bodies they bring to the paper instigate you to free yourself - they dare you! Her subjects emanate and illuminate a joy you want to reach out and touch; a joy that you will envy because it does not need your approval.
Queer, non-conformist, rebellious, disobedient, loud, huge, THERE. Nadine Faraj’s art disrupts your gaze and demands that you disobey.
- Mona Eltahawy, feminist author based in Cairo and New York.