Roots

Fouad Agbaria in a solo show

Curator: Farid abu Shakra

Roots | Solo show

Opening: Saturday 13/9/25 at 12 noon

The veteran artist, who moves between Musmus and Umm al-Fahm, presents highly accomplished paintings alongside thin iron installations and a cactus installation that he made especially for the exhibition opening on Saturday, September 13th at the Givat Haviva Art Gallery. Agbaria, who also moves on the line between identities and affiliations, invites viewers to meander through his roots.

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Agbaria explores his past with his hands: the rough textures he scooped from the soil, which he still cultivates today, are placed on the canvas in a way that brings his realistic and fantastical paintings to life. The wild and charged landscape of his childhood changed throughout his life and gave rise to difficult feelings of disappointment, frustration, and emotional detachment, which he translated into art that sends out roots in all directions, clinging and being uprooted, intertwining and letting go.

The motif of roots appears in all of his works, as a symbol that seeks to be embedded in national, familial, and agricultural soil, but is torn away and reveals prominent, sensual, and aggressive living roots that connect him to his father and mother, to childhood memories and culture, and to the uprooting to which he clings.

Agbaria grows cactus hedges and produces stems, forcing proximity on plants that did not choose to come close, and reviving ideas born in his orchard located not far from the separation wall. This severance of the space and the fabric of life is expressed in large paintings, rich in strokes of color, that will fill the gallery walls, ranging from anger to lyricism and longing. At the center of the space will stand the living model, a cactus whose exposed, torn roots will suck up liquid, part water, part blood, from an artificial source; in this way, the cactus will continue to exist and breathe even outside its natural environment, resuscitated by the artist.

For the first time, Agbaria's carpets also undergo a metamorphosis: after painting countless embroidered Palestinian carpets, this time they too become metal installations, laser-cut, with their colorful threads hiding behind them and reminiscent of the familiar order of things. These carpets, which have lost the softness of the fabric, also tell his story and send roots back to his personal and national biography.

Curator text here

Portfolio here

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Virtual tour here