Nadia Ayari, Facing I, 2024, Oil on linen (detail)
M7, Msheireb Downtown Doha, Doha, Qatar
BOOTH M203
www.artbasel.com
Our booth presents Views from the Observation Deck, five new paintings by New York–based Tunisian artist Nadia Ayari, offering a carefully curated encounter with her singular visual language. Merging figuration and abstraction, Ayari constructs a constellation of protagonists inspired by the flora of her North African roots. In these recent works, petals, leaves, branches, and other organic forms recur as symbolic markers across luminous fields of saturated color, projecting outward from circular, vertical, and diagonal stems. Through their repetition and subtle variation, these delineated elements assemble futuristic still-life configurations—poetic forms suspended in motion. Ayari’s meticulous layering of oil paint on vibrant grounds creates compositions that appear caught in the pull of an unseen force. As she explains:
“My work tackles narratives of survival. Lately, I have been exploring images where, against all odds, my paintings’ branches, pink flowers and leaves are thriving; either by being in motion or in connection with one another.”
This suite of new works evokes the notion of phenometry—the scientific study and measurement of plant growth. Ayari carefully traces the dendritic curves, symmetrical edges, and evolving overlaps of her floral characters, rendering them with the precision of a researcher while infusing each composition with conceptual depth. At this intersection, her practice resonates with a philosophical posthumanist perspective: each painting resists a singular narrative, instead generating a matrix of interwoven codes. The characters she invents embody multiple identities at once, allowing multivalent stories to germinate across the canvases.
Nadia Ayari
Born 1981
Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York
Nadia Ayari is a Tunisian American painter known for her distinctively textured compositions that negotiate the line between abstraction and figuration while exploring narratives of survival. Ayari moved to the United States in 2000, where she earned a BA in Art History from Boston University and an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Drawing on forms inspired by the flora of her native North Africa, her paintings develop a cast of recurring protagonists—petals, leaves, branches, and hybrid organic shapes—that operate as visual metaphors for our Anthropocene condition. Rendered in meticulously layered oil paint, her surfaces possess a sculptural tactility that makes her characters and the spaces they inhabit physically resonant. Ayari’s work is held in numerous international collections, including: Collection Pinault (Paris, France); Dalloul Art Foundation (Beirut, Lebanon); X Museum (Beijing, China); Kamel Lazaar Foundation (Tunis, Tunisia); The Scantland Collection (Columbus, Ohio); Fundación Medianoche (Granada, Spain); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakesh, Morocco); Barjeel Foundation (Sharjah, UAE); State Museum of Contemporary Art (Thessaloniki, Greece); and the Saatchi Collection (London, UK).
