Imane Farès is honored to present Laila Shawa's first solo exhibition at Imane Farès Gallery. It deals with a current and subversive subject, the women matyrs. Palestinian artist Laila Shawa constantly travels between Gaza and London where she lives and works. Her work intermingles scrapings, scratches, imprints, calligraphy, geometrical variations, abstract patterns and figures. In that tension between symbols and meanings, it is always painting that wins. Tensions and frictions, paradoxes and contradictions weave the web of a relentless quest for identity, between the undecipherable and the revealed. A quest that most often expresses itself through dense series : Women and the Veil, Women and Magic, Hands of Fatima, Walls of Gaza, the very recent Sarab. Those series testify not only to Laila Shawa’s artistic commitment, but as much to her critical, philosophical, pedagogical and even political involvement. For her first solo show, Laila Shawa presents almost a dozen new works at the IF Galerie. It is a name that fully applies to the preferred artistic content of the artist as in her previous work.