In Malak Mattar's recent work, flowers are never only flowers. Lilies, poppies, anemones and wildflowers from Palestine appear painted close up, isolated against grounds of red, black, white and green. Arranged in groups of four, these panels read as a flag assembled from botany. Across the land, the flower has long carried what the flag could not openly carry. Mattar paints them large, frontal and saturated, as if to insist that what grows from the soil also keeps a record of it.
The flower is also a name. Two portraits invoke Zahrat al-Uqhuwan, the Chrysanthemum Flower, a women's organisation founded in Jaffa by the sisters Moheeba and Nariman Khorsheed. In 1947 it moved from social work to armed resistance. In one portrait, the name and date are brushed in Arabic beside a woman's face, rendered in the sepia tones of an archival photograph. In the other, a woman in a headscarf holds a rifle before an olive tree, in the rust and umber of a burning landscape. Mattar restores these women to the visual record of 1948, from which women's political agency has so often been cropped, and she gives their organisation's name back its literal meaning: a flower that fought.
The olive tree is the exhibition's other spine. It appears first as an ancient trunk, fissured and monumental, and later on fire, its bark alight in blotches of orange. In a small diptych, it burns beside a chain-link fence. Together these works trace a sequence from rootedness to enclosure to erasure, without depicting a single act of violence directly. At the centre herein lies the Bride of Palestine, playing homage to one of the oldest olive trees in the world in the village of Al-Walaja.
Against this, Mattar sets her recurring figure of the woman who holds. A mother presses a child against her in front of the sea, and her face is half-covered by an embroidered panel of flowers. The painting is dedicated to Sliman Mansour (1947–2026), a gesture of lineage towards the painter who made the Palestinian woman and the land into one image. Elsewhere, a mother and child sit within a field of poppies. In Freedom, a woman spins in a thobe of birds, her arms flung open to the sky. Doves and pigeons recur throughout, and one carries Ghassan Kanafani’s (1936-1972) words, "Bodies fall, not the idea.” Kanafani, the writer who made Palestinian loss into literature, joins Mansour here as a second ancestor. These women do not wait at the edges of the picture. They stand at its centre, holding children, holding embroidery, and holding the land in the patterns they wear. What the fence encloses and the fire consumes, they carry forward in their arms and on their dresses. Kanafani's line becomes the key to the whole body of work: the body may fall, but what it holds does not.
Mattar was born in Gaza in 1999, into a family displaced from the village of Al-Jora. She studied at UNRWA schools and began painting at thirteen, during the 51-day assault on Gaza in 2014, using school watercolours while confined indoors. Unable to leave Gaza under the blockade, she shared her work online, and within three years she had a sell-out solo exhibition at the Palestine Museum in Bristol. Scholarships took her to Istanbul Aydin University to study political science, and in 2023 to Central Saint Martins in London for a Master's in Fine Art. She left Gaza on 6 October 2023, the day before the war began. Her work then shifted to monochrome testimony, culminating in No Words (2024), a five-metre painting first shown in Venice during the 60th Biennale. In 2025 she became the first Palestinian artist to hold a solo exhibition at Central Saint Martins, and the British Museum has acquired her work. She is also the author and illustrator of the children's book Sitti's Bird (2021).
Across these phases, her subject has never been only loss. It is how memory is kept alive in images that refuse to disappear: a flower, a name, a woman, a tree.