Dance of Love (Dance de l’Amour), 1994
The gallery's solo presentation with Lebanese Surrealist pioneer, Juliana SERAPHIM, at TEFAF Maastricht 2025 ( Focus section | Booth 704) is prominently featured in an article written by Keridwen Cornelius for the New York Times about the theme of ecofeminism at the fair.
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Born in 1934 in Jaffa in southern Tel Aviv, Seraphim fled to Lebanon when the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out. As a painter, she was criticized by her fellow Palestinian artists for not addressing their cause.
“Juliana was much more focused on women’s liberation,” said Niamh Coghlan, director of Richard Saltoun Gallery, in a video interview. “She felt that women were the most beautiful forms and the most sensitive, empathetic creatures on Earth. That was what she wanted to paint.”
Seraphim, who died in 2005, saw a world marred by wars, inequalities, harsh living conditions and heartless social interactions. She wanted to show people what she called “a woman’s world,” infused with love, beauty, sensitivity and entanglement with nature.
In her work “The Eye,” Seraphim painted women wearing insect wings and diaphanous dresses laced with capillaries, gliding through buildings resembling stone hoodoos. “Dance of Love” portrays sunken machines and buildings beneath a female form triumphantly springing from a flower amid pink swirls and a stylized snake. In “Flower Woman,” a sphinxlike woman’s head envelops petals and a seahorse, while butterfly wings cascade down her back and blossoms fill her breast. All three works are included in the Maastricht show.
“You can see her playing with the way that the environment is the human body,” Coghlan said. “We’ve made a divisive point of saying that humans and the natural world are very different. But they’re the same thing. Juliana was interested in pulling them back together.”
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Richard Saltoun Gallery's presentation at TEFAF Maastricht is on view 15–20 March 2025.
