Hala Marji is a Lebanese visual artist, residing in Portugal.
Originally a graphic designer, she pursued painting in 2022 after thirteen years of professional design practice. The decision marked a turning point, at the age of forty. It came as a response to a deep and urgent awareness of time, following a personal hardship that reshaped her perspective.
Hala holds a BGD from the Lebanese American University and Masters in Image and Communication at Goldsmiths University College of London,UK. She taught and shared her experience in identity design and typography at HCU & LIU in Lebanon. She cofounded Notaclinic design studio in 2008. On 2022, she decided to fully practice visual expressive art.
Her work evolves around the concept of living creatures that we are. She deeply digs into our living souls and emotions that are protected and displayed by our bodies. Looking for life absurdities and meaning, she draws human faces and limbs, creating a surreal, almost chaotic composition against a calm subtle background.
In her paintings, she reinterprets the notion of “body” as limited structures we are trapped in. While the mind could silently and lightly fly free as it wishes, the body, on the contrary, is heavy and limited. It expires, bleeds and breaks. The body itches, hurts, inflames and dehydrates…
Through her work, she portrays the heavy weight of the body that we carry the moment we live. The result is an often rebellious yet harmonious arrangement of organic, fluid, amorphous like shapes, reinterpreting our body and relation to it.
On the canvas, my soul is free at its best;
it flies, it slows, it lives.
