Biography
Early Foundations of Vision
Born in 1956 into a cosmopolitan merchant family in Dubai, Makki was shaped by her immediate environment, including her home, family, and her father’s herbal medicine shop. She developed an appreciation for the physical properties of light, shadow, and form, as well as for colour, texture, and tonal variation while observing her mother and sisters folding clothing and sewing. The materiality of raw pigments and domestic crafts has continued to inspire her artistic palette and her manner of mark-making. Her early compositions are relatively abstract, drawing from the realities of her urban life in Dubai and contradictions with the simpler desert and coastal lifestyles that had gone before. Her colourful and fluid brush strokes are set against dark lines—in her work, tradition sits alongside modernity, as it does within UAE contemporary culture.
Sunrise, painted in the 2000s, serves as an example of the visual inspirations that have guided Makki throughout her career. Rather than relying solely on academic Western colour theory, the painting consists of vibrant colour arrangements, with the ochre and yellow of henna and saffron layered with other pigments. These colours express the botanical remedies, herbs, and traditional potions concocted in the Makki family's shop. Materials such as these became important geographical and cultural identifiers as her work developed.
Studying Art and Spatial Composition
Due to the lack of art schools in the UAE at the time, Makki became one of the first Emirati women artists to receive a government scholarship to study art abroad in 1977. She travelled to the College of Fine Arts in Cairo at the age of 18 to study for a Bachelor of Fine Arts in relief and metal sculpture, followed by a Master of Fine Arts, also in Cairo, in 1988. She chose to specialise in sculpture; this decision profoundly impacted her approach to the two-dimensional surface, instilling a longstanding preoccupation with spatial depth, physical relief, and materiality into her artistic practice.
Makki returned from Egypt in the late 1980s, and her first exhibition took place at the Al Wasl Sports Club in Dubai in 1987. Having incorporated welded metal in her earlier sculptural practice in Cairo, she continued to experiment with different materials, including clay and fibre, looking for rhythms, colours, and patterns. Makki’s love of sculpture translates into her paintings, where compositions focus on shape, form, and sensation. She explores natural colours, pigments and relates to the region’s geography and people, particularly its women.
An active member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society (EFAS) in Sharjah, Makki has exhibited at the annual EFAS art show almost every year since the society's founding in 1980. Through EFAS, Makki also experimented with Hurufiyya (letterism), occasionally embedding Arabic words and letters into her layered canvases. A dynamic artist, Makki has travelled to the US and to East Asia to show her work and take part in residencies. In 2008, she took part in the International Art Forum in Changchun, China, representing the UAE. There she created a larger-than-life sculpture of a couple, evoking the physical rhythms, shapes, and patterns of contemporary Emirati daily life. The male and female forms echo the artist’s own feelings of community in the UAE, the physical earth, and organic forms. Makki’s art practice has evolved thanks to her openness to new ideas and techniques learnt along the way, as well as to an academic mindset of researching and seeking to understand the meaning and importance of the materials and forms. For example, while in Cairo, she was particularly inspired by the Abstract Expressionists, exploring mixed media and layering. Makki immediately set about synthesising these artistic styles and techniques by incorporating regional subject matter. Composition (1988) shows the influence of Expressionism, with dark lines evoking the deep and shifting sand dunes of the Emirates. There appear to be silhouettes or figures rising from the sand dunes, and she uses mixed media and layering to evoke both the mood and the region’s cultural history. For example, in this painting, she includes nets and natural pigments to focus the eye and reference the region’s traditional lifestyles and beliefs. They are the nets of fishermen and pearl divers and also the netting or strings indigenous Bedouin travellers use to bundle their possessions together when loading them onto camels for transport from encampment to encampment.
