Maliheh Afnan’s trajectory as an artist is inextricably linked with the history of the region where she grew up. The family were forced to flee persecution in Iran because of their Bahá’í faith, and subsequently settled in Haifa. In 1949, following the Nakba, they left Palestine to seek refuge in Lebanon. M. Afnan graduated from the American University of Beirut in 1955 with a degree in sociology and psychology, and moved with her husband to the United States, where she enrolled at the Corcoran School of Arts and Design in Washington, D.C. She graduated in 1962 with a Master of Fine Arts, and her displacements continued: she lived in Kuwait from 1963 to 1966, Beirut until 1974 and Paris for the following twenty-three years before moving to London in 1997.

M. Afnan manifested a keen interest in letters and numbers from childhood, inventing an imaginary script based on Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic and English texts that she collected in the form of letters, invoices and advertisements. Her early drawings incorporate words and fragments of letters, and this practice of graphic inclusion persisted, lending some of her works on paper the air of ancient scrolls or tablets.

She discovered the work of American artist Mark Tobey (1890–1976) at the Philips Collection in Washington, D.C. The first artist to use abstract scripts in modern art, M. Tobey would have a profound effect on her career: he was her mentor for a period, and in 1971 presented an exhibition of her works at the Galerie Claire Brambach in Basel.

The works of M. Afnan are often small-scale, in muted, earthy monochrome palettes, sometimes seeming rusty or charred. Their surfaces appear to be coated in a patina, achieved through the application of successive layers of pigment and the accumulation of lines and textures. The artist’s biographer, Fadia Antar, points to five successive periods in her work, throughout which M. Afnan’s research into displacement was ongoing: Writings or Traces (1980s–1990s), Landscapes or Places (1980s–1990s), People or Faces (1990s), Reliefs and Objects (1990s–2000s) and Veiled (2000–2009).

In her creation of a unique language that draws on her own cultural heritage and on the strata of other civilisations (Persian miniatures, ancient manuscripts), themes of memory, archaeology and the written word are essential sources of inspiration. Traces of the suffering linked to exile, conflict, destruction and violence in the Middle East also emerge. Wartorn (1978) is a work on burned cardboard, and recalls the bombings of the Lebanese War. Rooted in memories, M. Afnan calls up places, texts and faces from her past. She writes the mother tongues that she spoke, she draws the landscapes, the geographies, the houses that she inhabited.

Some of the works, almost abstract, evoke emerging faces, rediscovered relics, notably in the Veiled period. In this, her latest period, the artist explored the veils of the interior – emotions, feelings, veiled threats – in ink and gauze on Nepalese paper. Of her own practice, the artist said: “I write my painting”.