About the artist:

Juliana Seraphim is a Palestinian-born painter. She was a refugee in Sidon, displaced after the 1948 Nakba. She gained prominence in Palestinian, Lebanese, and later, international art spheres for her unique surrealist art style which incorporated themes of homeland, femininity, memory, and identity.

Seraphim was born in 1934 in Jaffa, Mandatory Palestine. At the age of 14, her family was displaced by the Nakba and subsequently forced to flee by boat to Sidon, Southern Lebanon. There, she attended a Catholic boarding school for three years. Seraphim was among the first waves of Palestinian refugees to be forcibly relocated to Beirut, Lebanon in 1952. Upon being displaced, she worked as a secretary at UNRWA while simultaneously attending art classes.

In Beirut, Seraphim developed her personal style and began to produce some of her most notable works. She studied under the tutelage of Lebanese painter Jean Khalifé, exhibiting her works for the first time in his studio. After studying at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and independently with other local contemporary artists, she began to exhibit her work in solo exhibitions, gaining fame through her association with a local set of creators dubbed the Ras Beirut artists. During her tertiary years, she was awarded grants to study abroad in Madrid and Florence. Seraphim began her China ink drawings in Madrid; art critic Carlos Adriane suggested the medium was best suited to Seraphim's surreal imagination.

Seraphim represented Lebanon in three biennials - Alexandria (1962), Paris (1963), and São Paulo (1967). In 1960 Seraphim studied at the Royal Academy of Fernando in Madrid, Spain. In 1965 Seraphim was awarded a scholarship that helped her travel to Paris, where she stayed for two years. Seraphim's exhibitions gained notoriety during this trip, meriting her an appearance in Planete Magazine. Seraphim was published in Hiwar twice, once in Hiwar no. 4 1963 for her illustrations of Leila Balabakki's The Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon. Seraphim was published a second time in 1967 Hiwar no. 26-27. In 1971 Seraphim completed Shorewood publishers commission for 27 engravings to illustrate a special de luxe portfolio anthology of the works of nine Nobel Prize writers.

Whereas her Lebanese contemporaries often adopted a figurative style to address the central issues of the Palestinian struggle, Seraphim's visual language is characterized by complex, undulating layers and improvisational, dream-like imagery. Through this unique style, she created an imaginative realm that allowed her to reimagine her loneliness and social isolation as an unmarried woman artist in a patriarchal society. Art was her joy, and her easel provided safety and serenity away from both society and war. During times of war and heavy shelling in Lebanon, Seraphim described her persistence in creating art and the gradual dissolution of her fear. Her paintings served as a tonic for her continuous struggle for women's rights and a peaceful world. In a 1997 interview with LaTeef Nelda, Seraphim stated, “My motivation is to find God, beauty, serenity — everything that you usually don't find in life. When you live in society, it's a struggle — not only a struggle — it's a battle all day long! On the other hand, when you are with your easel, you have peace, silence, and an unfolding, exploding vision before you.”

Early in life, Juliana Seraphim felt a need to create art. With her family's financial support, she trained in both European Old Master and Eastern artistic traditions, embarking on a journey through abstract, surrealist, materialist, and realist expressions. Starting with illustrations, Seraphim eventually gained recognition both internationally and within the Ras Beirut art circle. Influenced by the spiritualism movements of the 1960s and 70s, her artwork incorporates empowered women within fantastical, elemental realms of architecture and nature. Additionally, Seraphim cited Hieronymus Bosch and Max Ernst as her artistic influences.

In the aforementioned 1997 interview with LaTeef Nelda, Seraphim detailed her creative process as rooted in both the mundane and the collective unconscious. She walked through the world with a sense of wonder at architecture, fauna and flora, elements, stars, and living beings. Later, she used fantastical architecture to summon shapeshifting muses from her inner sanctum. Her fierce fantasy style drew from early memories of winged angels depicted on ceiling frescoes in her grandfather's convent in Jerusalem. Her family name, Seraphim, traces back to the Hebrew plural “seraph,” the many-winged guardian angels of God's throne, often represented in Byzantine and Islamic art. By avidly incorporating winged motifs in her bold oil portraits of women, Seraphim captured an intricate connection between her art and self-identity.

Seraphim's iconic image became the surrealist “woman-flower,” reincarnated and reconstructed through each of her artistic periods. She composed dreamlike, fantastical biomorphic subjects that disrupted traditional spatial compositions and bodily forms. Her pieces defy the burden of gravity, elevating her ethereal understanding of the feminine — at times fully visible, at others dissipating into the radiant background. Through this visual language, Seraphim sought to liberate the woman's subconscious and discover her inner being — in essence, embodying sensuality and irrevocable autonomy.

In both Lebanon and France, Seraphim's women subjects asserted their identities in societies that often judged a woman's value based on her relationships with men. Seraphim envisioned the women she painted as “sophisticated and cosmopolitan,” adaptable across cultures and resilient in their struggle against patriarchal oppression. She championed this vision of empowerment within the international art market, where collectors and audiences at times devalued her work simply due to its inherent femininity.