Picasso Art Gallery Zamalek to host ‘Landmarks of Estrangement’ art exhibition for Afifa Aleiby on Nov. 7

CAIRO – 3 November 2021: Picasso Art Gallery in Zamalek will hold a special art exhibition for the Iraqi artist, Afifa Aleiby, entitled “Landmarks of Estrangement.”

Held on November 7 at 7 p.m., the exhibition shows 30 paintings from Aleiby’s amazing work.

Aleiby is one of the pioneers of the women's movement in plastic art in the Arab and Western world.

Through her long career and constant movement between the various geographical and cultural regions, Aleiby has absorbed the nectar of the international plastic movement, and has become distinctive among Arab plastic artists.

Afifa Aleiby was born in 1953 in the city of Basra in the far south of Iraq. She began her studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad while working as an illustrator in the Iraqi press; she then left Iraq for the Soviet Union in 1974 to study and specialize in monumental art at the famous Stoikov Institute in Moscow.

Because of the political situation in Iraq, Aleiby was unable to return to her homeland after completing her studies and decided to move to Italy and later return to Moscow. Afterwards, she settled in Yemen to work as a teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts.

Not being able to return to her country of origin for 35 years, she succeeded in building a strong cultural and social relationship with every country she had lived in, which of course refined her art.

Aleiby uses the female image as a recurring element to shed light on every society’s beauty, taste, and politics.