Munira Nusseibeh belongs to the generation of Jordanian artists who took the figure as a way of picturing the life of the Arab world. Trained in Paris but working from the people and customs of her own society, she illustrates the communal and the everyday, the gathering, the act of prayer, the company of women, raising ordinary presence to a still and monumental dignity.

Untitled (2022) comes out of Nusseibeh’s time in the United Arab Emirates and takes the women of the Emirates as its subject. The veiled figures gathered around the standing woman belong to the social world she observed there, the company of women and the rituals of gathering that order their daily life. Pared to ochre and black and to a few solid, simplified masses, the painting sets aside individual likeness to picture Emirati women as a collective presence and the shared custom that binds them.