Adnan Yahya is among one of the few Arab artists to have dedicated their lives and their art to expressing the essence of one of the most tragic issues of our time. The driving force behind his art has always been the suffering of the Palestinian people. His paintings are like a profound narrative reflecting the history and the aspirations of his people. His works are those of a witness who has seen and lived the events from the inside, as a child and as a young man, for he was not yet twenty when he found himself face to face with the Sabra and Shatila massacre.   1982	.	"From Sabra and Shatila... to Independence?" 1982-1999 1999 This was a turning point in his art. In his work of that period, death, which reaps the bodies and the souls of its victims, finds its antithesis in paintings which defy death. So the art of Adnan Yahya is a unique combination of memory, history and art. This is not unprecedented when we contemplate world art and the important role played by those artists who have embodied the great tragedies of their people in memorable works. For art reflects the fact that it is not possible for men to exist without memories. When we examine the development of Adnan Yahya's art, we discover the links between the different phases of his work. These can be found in his powerful expressive and symbolic ability, beginning with his works devoted to Sabra and Shatila in which groups of lacerated victims dominate the foreground. His art then moves on to the Hebron massacre, in which a gravestone and the tiled floor of the mosque are prominent symbols. The promise of independence leads him to a growing use of a symbolic circle, which in later works becomes a surrealistic human head. Finally, his human figures become unidentifiable: they gather, disperse, collide and dissolve into a mass which at first appears unified, but which also carries elements of its own dissolution. Throughout all these different periods of Yahya's work, there is a persistent individuality of style, both in his ink drawings and in his paintings. Adnan Yahya has lived the story of his people, and in his work he both depicts and documents it. It is at once the source and the substance of his art. Darat Al Funun
Exhibition details at Darat al Funun