Hilda Hiary: A Way in the World ..Of all the important connections one makes in life, the most significant are sometimes also the most fortuitous. My meeting with Hilda Hiary in New York is one such fortuitous event.. As a curator and art historian interested in the Middle East because of its longstanding links with the African continent, and for the volatile nature of the region’s involvement in international superpower politics. its status as a historical junction of three continents is both the gift and burden of the Middle East, which is the birthplace of three major world religions..Hilda Hiary is a contemporary artist from the Middle East who refuses to be defined by stereotypes, and whose works explore vast ranges of human emotion and experience. She is gifted with impressive amounts of empathy, which she channels as an offering to the world through her art. In these days of over-determined political and cultural identities, it is easy to label an artist like Hilda Hiary on the facts of her gender (she is a woman), ethnicity (she is self identified as “an Arab-Jordanian†artist).. Suffice it to say that Hilda Hiary is an impressive human being and an artist whose work demand contemplation of their unique qualities. She lives and works in her native Jordan but is also a cosmopolitan global citizen and very widely traveled.and has exhibited at very important venues including recent exhibitions in the United States She is a prolific artist whose creativity unfolds across several media. she has produced a very strong body of painting, video installation , murals and artist-book projects. During this time, her paintings evolved from dense Tapestry-influenced compositions hedged by linear blocks of color to a nuanced expressionist rendering of circular motifs. These latter paintings are exuberant but also quite contemplative; their circular forms emerged from the tangle of her earlier works to dominate the pictorial surface in dense swirls that vaguely suggest exploding galaxies. These circular forms recur and have become a primary theme of her recent paintings. The repetitive nature of the paintings is like a mantra; quiet but persistently making its way into consciousness. her style of painting (and her art in general) is uncommon in Arabic countries but Hiary’s artworks have won international prizes, in recognition of their unique quality. Her abstract paintings with their circular motif evoke different states of being and fulfill an earlier promise of abstract art as an avant-garde quest for spiritual direction. At the same time, it is easy to identify various points of engagement with the harsh political reality of the Middle East in these artworks, which makes their beauty all the more heartbreaking. Artworks like (The Black Day) in Amman, a 2005 installation piece are further distilled into the explosive paintings of the Lebanon series which in specific pieces like Destroying Lebanon 2006, level a harsh indictment against the zero-sum politics of war in that context. These artworks eschew polemics and instead make their points with quiet determination. Her recent paintings for this exhibition include articles culled from newspaper articles about the Middle East collected during her international travels, a wide range of contending information that attempt to summarize a whole region in a few sentences. These articles are a compendium of international attitude towards Middle Eastern people and are interesting in their variety and levels of information and misinformation. All in all, we can confidently assert that Hilda Hiary is a very serious artist whose art engages the human condition in ways that are universal. She is a pure painter and the message of her practice is that art has the ability to unite the world.. Her art is ultimately optimistic and in their harsh beauty, provide an oasis in which the imagination can rest in its quest for a better or at least more propitious human future....Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie Ph.D. Professor of Art History University of California Santa Barbara..
