Frieze Masters 2026

Lawrie Shabibi is pleased to return to Frieze Masters, this time with a solo booth of Maliheh Afnan (1935–2016). Born in Haifa, Palestine, to a family of Persian descent, Maliheh Afnan grew up during a turbulent period in the Middle East, where Arab, Persian, and Western cultures intersected. Her work draws on both personal and collective histories, reflecting a life marked by displacement and exile. 

Afnan grew up surrounded by different cultures, languages and religions in a Persian family in exile in Palestine, before being forcibly uprooted after 1948. She lived a fast-paced diasporic life across major Western metropolises on both shores of the Atlantic, including Washington D.C., Paris and London. Her experiences of migration and cultural rupture informed a lifelong exploration of memory, identity, and belonging. As Afnan reflected, she did not possess “a single identifying root”; instead, her practice emerged from the accumulation of places, encounters, and histories that continued to inhabit her memory.

The past was Afnan’s primary artistic memory. Her works function as an archive of encounters, dialogues, exchanges, and geographies, preserving traces of experiences that risked disappearing with the passage of time. Her practice reflects the boundary between the loss of a culture and its continuation through sparse, fragmented remnants. Working on an intimate scale with ink and coloured pigments on paper, Afnan developed a distinctive visual language in which references to script, landscape, and the human face are transformed into evocative meditations on time, place, and cultural inheritance.

Throughout her practice, Afnan explored the relationship between abstraction and representation through recurring motifs of writing, cartography, landscape, and portraiture. These elements are not fixed, and continuously shift and transform into one another: landscapes become maps, maps dissolve into faces, and inscriptions become topographies of memory. Her compositions exist between legibility and abstraction, creating spaces where personal histories and collective experiences converge. Through layered surfaces, delicate marks, and fragmented forms, Afnan created works that suggest both the presence and absence of what has been lost.

The presentation at Frieze Masters brings together works spanning key periods of Afnan’s practice, including her Paysages and Ecritures series from the 1970s and 1980s, alongside her later Personnages works developed from the 1980s onwards. In the Paysages and Ecritures works, Afnan experimented with text-like marks, inscriptions, and layered surfaces that evoke fragments of memory, language, and place. The works appear as traces of a visual language that sits between writing and image, suggesting histories that remain partially visible yet impossible to fully recover.

Beginning in the 1980s, Afnan developed her Personnages series, culminating in the ravaged faces of the 1990s that capture traces of lived experience. Timeless figures emerge throughout these works, appearing suspended between different places, eras, states of mind, and emotional landscapes. These works resemble a lost archive - a register of presences, biographies, and identities shaped by the passage of time. As Afnan described, her figures seem to “wear a map of their lives on their faces,” carrying the accumulated experiences of displacement and memory within their features, transforming the portrait into an archive of lived experience. Some figures remain recognisable and occasionally humorous, while others emerge through a metamorphic process, suspended between face, landscape, and memory.

Across both her abstract compositions and figurative works, Afnan returned to the same fundamental concerns: memory, displacement, identity, and the preservation of traces. Her practice transformed personal histories into universal reflections on migration, belonging, and the ways in which places and experiences continue to shape us. Through her singular visual language, Maliheh Afnan remains a key figure whose work bridges cultures, histories, and geographies, offering a meditation on the relationship between memory and place.