Emna Zghal
Brooklyn, NY
Emna Zghal is a Tunisian-born, U.S.-based visual artist. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Tunisia, France, Finland, Germany, Japan, Kuwait, India, Italy and the United Arab Emirates. Zghal has received fellowships and residencies with the Women’s Studio Workshop, the Newark Art Museum, the MacDowell Colony, the Weir Farm Trust and the Cité Internationale Des Arts in Paris. Reviews of her work have appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, ArtForum, ARTnews and The New Yorker, in addition to many Tunisian publications. Her works are included in the collections of the New York Public Library, Yale University, The Museum For African Art in New York, Grinnell College and numerous other public and private collections in the U.S. and Tunisia.
Plato/ Pineapple/ Poetry/ Painting
Emna Zghal is a Tunisian-born, U.S.-based visual artist. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Tunisia, France, Finland, Germany, Japan, Kuwait, India, Italy and the United Arab Emirates.
Artist BioPlato/ Pineapple/ Poetry/ Painting is an artist’s book and a series of prints exploring the relationship between art and reason. Plato deemed poets, who have the skill to represent all sorts of things, to be disturbers of the peace. He proposed to banish them from an Ideal City ruled by reason. Similarly, when contemporary art discourse became dominated by philosophy, poetry was overlooked. In the book, Zghal intersperses quotes by Plato, Matisse, Heaney and Baldwin, among others, with her own commentary. In the background are images derived from the pineapple, which serve as the artist’s visual counterargument to reason and enforce the importance of play and pleasure. The series of prints similarly relish in the inventiveness of artistic play, utilizing papyrus sheets made from pineapple fruit and molds of the rind, in addition to drawing, photography and digital processes.