Samia Osseiran Junblatt, 1944–2024
By Emily Cheung
Installation view of SAMIA OSSEIRAN JUNBLATT’s Sunset, 1968, oil on canvas, 109.5 × 69 cm, at the 60th Venice Biennale, 2024. Photo by Matteo de Mayda. Courtesy La Biennale di Venezia.
Lebanese modernist Samia Osseiran Junblatt, renowned for her abstract painting infused with Japanese figuration, passed away at the age of 80 in December. Her death was announced by the Beirut-based cultural institution, the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), which loaned her work to the Venice Biennale this year.
Born and based in Saida, Lebanon, the artist earned her bachelor’s in fine arts from the Beirut College for Women in 1965, then her MFA from the Pius XII Institute in Florence, Italy, two years later. She taught at the Lebanese American University (formerly Beirut University College) from 1971–73, before she was granted a scholarship to study graphic arts at the University of Fine Arts in Tokyo the next year. In 1977, she founded the still-active Artisana of Saida and South Lebanon, an organization that encourages artistic practice among women.
Inspired by the milieu of the 1960s, Junblatt created abstract canvases influenced by her training in Tokyo. With recurring motifs like the cosmos and organic forms, the artist felt she “was always following an unknown light that pervades everything, that emanates from the soul and from nature.” Her typical play on geometry and perspective in contemplating impermanence is epitomized in her most well-known composition, Sunset (1968), which was featured at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
Osseiran continued her artistic output across the decades of Lebanon’s postwar
conflicts, making her one of the most well-respected female artists in her
generation. Her work has been shown in Beirut at the Beirut Art Center and Sursock Museum as well as by dealerships such as Galerie Tanit and Agial Art Gallery. Abroad, her canvases have been shown at London’s Janet Rady Fine Art and at the Institut de
Monde Arabe in Paris. Her work is in the collection of the DAF, the Lebanese Ministry of Culture (now under the care of the Beirut Museum of Art), and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah.
Emily Cheung is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
