Rania Matar: SHE: @ Robert Klein Gallery (38 Newbury Street)
73.15 x 91.44 cm
Robert Klein Gallery is pleased to present a selection of photographs by Boston-based photographer Rania Matar in SHE, a series of portraits depicting women and womanhood across cultural boundaries. The women photographed in SHE contain multitudes: They’re playful but self-assured; soft yet strong; curious and adventurous. From Massachusetts to Beirut, Matar collaborates with these women to create images that reflect their experience leaving home and entering adulthood.
Matar’s work is inextricably linked to who she is as a mother, a Lebanese-American, and a woman. The artist photographs women across the Middle East and the United States, depicting the universality of the experience of womanhood. Inspired by her daughters, Matar focuses her lens on women who are the same age as them. In previous series, she’s captured pre-teen girls as they develop their sense of selfhood and teenage girls in bedrooms filled to the brim with art, makeup, and clothes. Now, she’s onto SHE, an exploration of early adulthood.
“Whereas in earlier projects, I photographed young women in relationship to the curated and controlled environment of their bedrooms,” says Matar, “I am photographing them in the larger environment they find themselves in after they leave home, the more global and complicated backdrop that now constitutes their lives in transitions.”
