Artists turn paintings into accessible, creative puzzles

AMMAN — The Wadi Finan Art Gallery on Saturday launched a collective exhibition featuring MID The Art Reach Project’s fine wooden puzzles, showcasing the work of artists Ahmed Nawash, Nissa Raad and Fadi Daoud.

“Giving back to the community one puzzle at a time” is the motto of the new project, which transformed the artists’ famous paintings into a collection of jigsaw puzzles that attendees can purchase with a percentage of the proceeds going to tree planting in Palestine.

“This is a new concept for the painting in Jordan,” artist Fadi Daoud told The Jordan Times at the opening, noting that “this has been done in other countries before, but here, it opens a new market for artists to put their paintings on a new platform. Plus, it becomes accessible for people who can’t afford buying the painting itself”.

“It is like a dialogue between yourself and the painting,” the artist said about the process of putting the puzzles together, highlighting how it makes you focus on the small details while rebuilding the painting.

Influenced by regional artists such as Hussein Bakeer or George Baghoury, Daoud’s artwork is linear in style. “The roots of my art are Islamic, but I remove the lines and rebuild them again,” the artist said, noting that there are no curves in his artwork, where shapes are destroyed and recreated with straight lines that meet each other to find their organic shape again.

A taste of fauvism, expressionism and surrealism is brought to the MID’s puzzles by Ahmad Nawash, who once described his own style as “a serious, sensitive search into the human form and what surrounds it, and the many tragedies caused by the events that take place in Palestine and the Arab world”.  

Born in Jerusalem in 1934, Nawash has held numerous solo exhibitions in Amman, Baghdad, Jerusalem and Paris,   and his work has been awarded the Gold Medal of the Seventh Kuwait Biennale (1981), the Gold Medal of the Arab Artists’ Association (1981) and the State Prize of Appreciation, Jordan (1990).

Drama, whimsy and expressiveness are artist Nissa Raad’s additions to the puzzles, with eye-catching paintings inspired by the work of her late grandmother, Fahrelnissa Zeid.

“She told me to be myself, lose myself and enjoy the process of painting — and that is what I do, whatever I paint, I don’t do it to please anybody, but to go through the process and enjoy it as much as possible,” Raad told The Jordan Times.