On Saturday, April 6, 2019, Juan Risso Gallery inaugurated its first solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Ariane Hafizi. Vibrant with lyricism, profound coherence, and an enduring life force, this posthumous exhibition marked the historic debut of the artist’s work in Spain, honoring a brilliant career that was tragically cut short when she passed away at the age of thirty-three.
The exhibition features two pivotal series of paintings and drawings created during Hafizi’s years in New York. The first is a powerful body of work executed in 2004, developed from photographs she captured during the historic 2003 anti-Iraq War demonstrations. In the second series, dated 2005, she approaches the theme of the female nude with extraordinary freedom and structural mastery. The curation is completed by a selection of her most intimate, small-format watercolors—deeply moving pieces created between 2013 and 2014 that reflect her interior life during her medical treatments.
In the words of the exhibition’s curator, José Ignacio Abeijón: "The fruit of Ariane's personal work and her meditations, both in her life and in her art, seems to transcend nature to integrate into it, to form a single and indissoluble whole."