Lina Husseini

Lina Maalouf Husseini (born Beirut, Lebanon, 1965) is a self-taught artist. She graduated from the American University of Beirut, where she majored in public administration. Her brightly colored sculptures loop and swirl around themselves, eclipsing and challenging academic rules and regulations. Exuberant in their presentation, the pieces take on a life of their own as they become characters in playful display. Husseini’s sculptures of metal, wood, clay, acrylic, glass, and PVC wind and unravel, twirl and cross back and forth conveying a sense of joyful buoyancy. Husseini grew up in Lebanon and France, and her work expresses a transcendence of East and West as her influence stems from both. As such, her work has been shown in Beirut, Lebanon, where she lives, as well as France and the US. Beginning her self-taught practice using papier-mâché, she built on these skills to explore various mediums playing with material, color and composition. She uses her practice to take everyday materials out of context, challenging cultural notions of use value and the quotidien and using her work to signal an optimistic transcendence of the human arenas of politics and society. Husseini lets her intuition inform her practice, eluding labels and evading classification.