Paul Becker

"The Peace" (2023) by Palestinian (Gaza) artist Dina Mattar There's something almost unbearably cruel about the fate of this painting. It is called The Peace. Palestinian artist Dina Mattar painted a world overflowing with the things she has returned to throughout her work: women, flowers, birds, colour, memory, tenderness and the stubborn insistence of ordinary Palestinian life. And then, in 2023, The Peace was left beneath the rubble of Gaza. Mattar was born in Gaza in 1985 and studied art at Al-Aqsa University. For years she worked within Gaza's extraordinary community of artists, becoming part of the Eltiqa Group for Contemporary Art, an independent space where Palestinian artists exhibited, taught, experimented and created. Mattar once explained that although Gaza had become known to the outside world through sorrow, war, siege and instability, she remained determined to make art there, to speak through it for people who simply wanted to live in safety and peace. That matters when looking at this painting. Her colours were never merely decorative. Flowers, trees, birds and the patterns of Palestinian embroidery repeatedly entered her paintings. Women occupied their centre. Beauty itself became a language: an insistence that Gaza was not merely the destruction endlessly photographed by the outside world, but homes, mothers, children, gardens, memory, imagination and life. Then came 2023. The Eltiqa gallery in Gaza City was destroyed. Mattar and her husband, Palestinian artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri, would later search through rubble trying to recover what remained of their work. Much had been lost. And somewhere beneath that devastation remained this painting. The Peace. There is an awful poetry in that title now. A painting imagining peace buried beneath the ruins of the place whose people had been denied it. Yet perhaps there is another way of seeing it. Because the rubble did not erase the painting completely. We still have its image. We still know its name. We still know the woman who painted it. And so The Peace survives in another form, carried beyond the place where the physical work was lost, reproduced, remembered and seen by people its artist may never meet. Perhaps that is one of the quiet powers of Palestinian art. A house can be destroyed. A studio can be destroyed. A gallery can be destroyed. A painting can disappear beneath rubble. But the idea it carried can escape. And somewhere beyond the ruins, The Peace is still being seen.