Manal: Anas Albraehe

In this collection, artist Anas Albraehe portrays the many changing faces of Manal, exploring the coordinates of her fluid and ever-shifting personality as presentations of the artist’s own authentic self. As his long term neighbor, Albraehe decided to paint Manal when one day he gazed out of the window and saw her hiding amidst a field of fava beans. Noticing him in the window, she held her doll above her head, bobbing up and down in an impromptu performance which, in the artist’s own words, ‘tickled’ his creativity. Having been born with Down-Syndrome, Manal was very much an outsider in her community, sidelined and often times, alone. As Albraehe paints her, Manal becomes the active core of their collaboration, existing unto-herself with a spontaneous ease, an authentic playfulness which resists performing for the sake of others, a lucidity that returns the artist’s gaze with an equally formidable glance or look. Embodied in these paintings, are not only the artist’s representations of a contemporary muse, but the way in which Manal looks at him, at the world around her, and at herself. As the artist puts it, “Manal is composed of a different harmony…the honest features of her face, the spontaneous and bold expressions of her movements…. she is the mirror that reflects my true self.”