1956–present
Najat Makki
Najat Makki was born in 1956 in Bur Dubai and in 1977 became the first Emirati woman to receive a government scholarship to study art abroad. She studied in Cairo, where she also earned a doctorate in the philosophy of art. She painted with henna, saffron and wars, and took part in the 2015 Venice Biennale in the national pavilion of the UAE.
Biography
As a child, Najat Makki painted on paper bags with indigo and alum from her father’s shop. He kept a herbal medicine shop, and it was full of boxes of herbs, indigo and blocks of alum. Later she recalled that for her everything has colour.
She was born in 1956 in Bur Dubai, in Dubai. At home, by her own account, she watched her sisters make cushions and curtains from brightly coloured fabric, and she learned about light and shadow from watching her mother fold clothes. Colour, she said, did not come to her by itself: she learned it from everything she saw. In 1977 Makki became the first Emirati woman to receive a government scholarship to study art abroad. She went to Cairo and there, at the College of Fine Arts, earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in relief sculpture and metalwork. In 2001 she defended a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of art, also in Cairo. The sources differ on the details of her studies: by some accounts, she studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Alexandria University and received her bachelor’s degree in 1982 and her master’s in 1988.
Among those who influenced her she named older Egyptian artists: the sculptor Mahmoud Mokhtar, Mohamed Saeed, Hamed Nada, the Wanly brothers, Al-Sagini and Saed Alsader. A second source was her local surroundings: the desert, the sea, folklore. Her work includes both realist and abstract expressionist pieces.
The main subject of her painting is woman. Makki said that only a woman can sense the concerns of another woman, and she tried to depict every side of women’s lives, their joys and their sorrows. Her figures are set in wide landscapes, and ornaments rooted in Emirati folk tradition are introduced into the space. She treated heritage as a material: “Others painted heritage, and I paint with heritage.” In the Emirates, by her own account, she was the first to paint female figures with henna, saffron and wars, the substances that women themselves used in the past. She began exhibiting no later than 2000: “Woman & Arts” in Sharjah, then the exhibition “For You Jerusalem” in Abu Dhabi and the Tehran Biennial in 2002, and the Sharjah Antiquities Museum in 2003. In 2004 her work was shown at an environment exhibition at the Dubai Trade Centre, at the Immar International Arts Workshop in Dubai, at the Frankfurt Book Fair and at the “Heritage Horizons” exhibition at the Abu Dhabi Officers Club. In 2014 she took part in the Abu Dhabi exhibition “Women/Creators: Visionary Women in the Emirates Art Scene”, in 2015 in the national pavilion of the UAE at the Venice Biennale, and in 2016 in the exhibition “Portrait of a Nation” in Abu Dhabi.
Her awards began in 1993 with the Jury Award at the first Sharjah International Biennial. In 1996 she received a silver award from the General Authority of Youth and Sports Welfare; in 1998 she was recognised at the Gulf Cooperation Council Biennial, and in 1999 at the Al Mahabaa Syrian International Biennial. In 2007 she was given the Emirates Appreciation Award for Arts, Science and Literature, and in 2008 the National Award for Arts, Science and Literature. She is a member of the Dubai Cultural Council.
Profile notes