1954–2019
Munira Mosli
Munira Mosli (1954–2019) was born in Mecca, studied in Cairo and the United States, and then worked as a designer at Aramco. She held her first exhibition at fourteen, and her mature style is generally thought to have emerged after the Beirut exhibition “Al-Wasiti and I” (1997). In her work she combined painting with three-dimensional materials: copper, palm fibre, papyrus, oysters and collage.
Biography
Munira Mosli’s first exhibition took place in 1968 at the School of Modern Education in Jeddah. There were two exhibitors: Munira herself, who was fourteen, and her colleague Safia bin Zaqer.
She was born in July 1954 in Mecca and drew from early childhood. She completed primary and secondary school in Lebanon and Egypt. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1972, also in Jeddah, her grandmother’s city. In 1974 she received a diploma from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo (according to other accounts, the faculty belonged to Alexandria University). She then continued her studies in the United States: in 1976 she showed work in a joint exhibition in California, and in 1979 she received a diploma in graphic design. At the same time she joined Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, as a publications design specialist in its public relations department. For the sake of art she left the job and, according to some accounts, moved to Bahrain. In 1990 she designed the poster “Earth and Nasi” for a research centre in the Dominican Republic. It was printed and sent to UNESCO libraries to be displayed on International Women’s Day in 1992. In 1994 she was chosen as a technical specialist for the artistic and media programmes of the Arab Gulf Programme in support of the United Nations Development Programme.
In 1997 the exhibition “Al-Wasiti and I” opened at the Alam Al-Fann Gallery in Beirut. The title, I think, refers to Yahya al-Wasiti, the illustrator of Arabic manuscripts. The exhibition is regarded as the beginning of her own style, and Mosli is called the first artist in Saudi Arabia to turn in her art to the tradition of manuscript miniature painting. In November 1997, during the exhibition, the Lebanese Ministry of Culture awarded her the Order of Merit. Two years later a series of exhibitions called “Children of Gaza” was held in Riyadh.
From 2003 she worked mainly as a painter, and in 2007 she founded the Art Festival in Khobar. In her work she used copper, natural dyes, palm tree fibre, plants, paper, papyrus, oysters and collage; handmade paper and old wooden windows set into the works are also mentioned. According to descriptions, she chose each material to suit her idea, trying out many. She drew inspiration from events in the Arab world, “human archaeology”, music, nature and poetry. The exhibition “The State of Art Now” at the Albareh Art Gallery (2011) grew out of her meeting with a fourteen-year-old girl who, as reported, had been killed by soldiers during the Iraq War. In the same year Mosli held a joint exhibition with the Qatari artist Youssef Ahmed and the Iraqi Ahmed Al-Bahrani at the Bait Muzna Gallery in Muscat. In 2016 her work was shown at the Hafez Gallery, at Art Dubai and at the Jeddah Art Festival; according to some accounts, her last exhibition was in Dubai. She received awards from Arab and international art organisations, and her studies of children’s drawing were published in local and Arab newspapers.
Munira Mosli died in January 2019 in Jeddah and was buried in Ruwais Cemetery.
Saudi media called her a pioneer of non-traditional plastic art in the country. The Minister of Culture, Prince Badr bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan Al Saud, directed that one of the kingdom’s art galleries be named after her.
Profile notes