Guided by her passionate inner life, Yasmine Iskander (1998–2024) expressed her world in brilliantly colored abstract paintings. She built compositions by alternately veiling and revealing shapes, applying washes that soften edges and then marking the plane with geometric or biomorphic elements that assert themselves with decisive clarity.
“My art expresses my feelings about the happy moments in my life, but also about the difficult times I have had, especially my many heart and brain surgeries,” Yasmine once explained. “When I paint, I feel strong, excited, exuberant and emotions flow as colors! I feel it in my heart. The colors and shapes that guide my work pop into my head. I use a range of vibrant colors.”
Yasmine’s visual responses were shaped, in part, by her deafness—a condition that sharpened other senses and altered the way she attended to the world. She cultivated a heightened visual attentiveness: a sensitivity to rhythm in form, to the cadence of color shifts, to the spatial qualities of layered shapes. “As a Deaf artist who wears hearing aids, I know that there are many ways to communicate. Colors are the most direct and powerful,” she said.
Rather than defining her work by limitation, this aspect of her life enriched it, producing paintings that feel attuned to subtler registers of perception. Her canvases translate experience into a distinct aesthetic grammar.
