Work
BIO
We’ve just received a trove of small studies from Zina Al-Shukri. Composed on cardboard backings from her children’s comic books, the drawings comprise a diary of interior meanderings, dating from 2012.
In her first exhibition at PSG in 2011, Zina presented a series of gouache and charcoal portrait dyptych’s she painted while teaching in Diyarbakir, Turkey. Her young female Turkish students, ages 15 – 19, posed for two portraits, one with a hair covering called a Hijab (Arabic), or Eşarp (Turkish), and another without. Al-Shukri’s portraits deftly juxtapose secular and traditional identity, creating an interplay of bi-cultural dichotomies.
Zina Al-Shukri was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1978. She moved with her parents to the United States when she was 5 years of age. Al-Shukri received her BA from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and attended the California College of the Arts, receiving her MFA in 2009.
Zina Al-Shukri is an emerging artist whose exhibition history includes Jack Hanley Gallery, San Francisco, and Pulliam Deffenbach Gallery, Portland, Oregon.