At Buro247 Middle East, we are committed to showcasing and celebrating the extraordinary talent in the Arab world. With our column, #BuroSpotlights, we bring you stories of pioneering artists, innovative creatives, and more.
This week, #BuroSpotlights Palestinian-Canadian Artist Laila Masri.
Some artists create from certainty. Laila Masri creates from inquiry. Her work lives at the intersection of identity, faith, and personal history, using painting and drawing as a way to examine the spaces where belonging becomes complicated. As a Palestinian and Canadian artist, she moves between cultural contexts with a clarity that shows up not in loud statements but in the quiet intentionality of her visual language.
Masri’s practice is grounded in the fundamentals. Composition, color, and texture are not decorative tools for her. They are the scaffolding through which she thinks. Every line has purpose. Every surface carries meaning. Masri gravitates toward two-dimensional work because it allows her to control how information enters the viewer’s eye. Her compositions are tightly constructed, often anchored by lines and shapes that guide movement across the canvas. She uses repetition to create rhythm and uses restraint to create tension. Nothing is accidental. Even her quietest palettes are calculated. Texture plays a critical role, too. She layers paint in subtle increments, creating surfaces that reward close inspection.
While many contemporary artists turn to figuration or symbolism, Masri continues to push abstraction. She treats composition as a narrative structure in itself. Balance, contrast, and spatial tension become her storytelling devices.
Her work often sits at the edge of control. A structured grid might be interrupted by a loose gesture. A quiet color field might be punctuated by a sharp, unexpected mark. These choices create a push-and-pull effect that keeps the viewer engaged. They reflect her ongoing interest in how order and disruption can coexist on the same plane.
Masri’s work is driven by the question of how visual systems carry emotional and intellectual weight. She is less interested in grand declarations and more invested in the mechanics of how art communicates. Her canvases often function like experiments: What happens when a color is repeated? When a line is displaced? When texture alters a shape’s authority?
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