Anabel Hadad

Biography

Anabel Hadad (b. 1996, Johnson City, TN) is a painter and interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. Anabel received her MFA (pending May 2023) from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and holds a BFA from East Tennessee State University.

Artist Statement

I paint uncanny forms combined with ambiguous spaces to depict the self versus the self, the self as personified in the disconnect between our corporeality and our subconscious. I situate these forms in environments that may not be theirs to inhabit, creating a sense of uneasiness and transgression. I use abstracted forms, automatic and often improvised painting approaches, and I use writing to work with and against these approaches. One idea of abstraction is that it exists beyond signification, where words and more transparent signification cannot as easily go. In this work both language and paint oscillate in and out of this abstraction. I use figuration to give form to this struggle with legibility, form as a false embodiment of the unconscious. This is where painting and words exist outside of what can be easily expressed, showing the awkward products of an adventure toward the language of the unconscious.  

Website: anabel-hadad.squarespace.com

Instagram: @hadad_art

Headshot by Naail Ali, BFA '23