Nabil Anani

Nabil Anani (b. 1943, Latroun, Palestine) is a Palestinian artist based in Ramallah. He works as a painter, ceramicist and sculptor. Many of his works use local materials such as leather, henna, natural dyes, papier-mâché, wood, beads and copper. His paintings of olive groves, villages and hills are built up on canvas with wood, straw, dried herbs, seeds and spices.

Anani graduated in fine art from Alexandria University, Egypt, in 1969 and returned to teach at the UN training college in Ramallah. In 1987, during the first Intifada, he founded the New Visions group with Vera Tamari, Tayseer Barakat and Sliman Mansour. The group made art from natural materials in place of Israeli art supplies. Works such as Intifada (1988), mixed media on leather, come from those years. Art of Memory: Life Before 1948 was shown at Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah, in 2014.

He held his first exhibition at the YWCA, Jerusalem, in 1972. Solo shows include A Journey Into Script at Foyles Gallery, London (2007) and In Pursuit of Utopia at Zawyeh Gallery, Ramallah (2021). The Land and I followed at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2023). He received the first Palestinian National Prize for Visual Art in 1997 and the King Abdullah II Prize for Fine Art in 2006. He also headed the League of Palestinian Artists. His work is in the collections of the British Museum, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and the Institut du monde arabe, Paris.