Across his tragically concise career, Asim Abu Shakra returned again and again to the cactus, or sabra, a plant layered with personal and collective significance. In Last Cactus (Black Cactus), 1990, and Cactus, 1988, the motif takes on distinct forms. In one it is pared down to a dark silhouette, while in the other it is enlivened with blossoms and framed in color. Together they highlight how a single subject could hold multiple registers of endurance, estrangement, and survival.

In Last Cactus (Black Cactus), 1990, the plant is almost engulfed by shadow. Its form rises as a dense, black outline, the background worked into a nearly monochrome field. The cactus appears austere, stripped to its barest presence. By contrast, in Cactus, 1988, the pads of the plant are painted in heavy black strokes but tipped with small red flowers, contained within a white pot. A bright orange border encircles the image, energizing the muted brown-grey background. Where the former is somber and reductive, the latter suggests persistence and even growth within confinement.

Born in Umm al-Fahm in 1961 and based in Tel Aviv until his death in 1990, Abu Shakra is remembered for making the cactus his central motif. The plant carries layered symbolism. In Palestinian tradition, it marks the ruins of villages destroyed in 1948, while in Israeli culture it has been adopted as a sign of toughness and belonging. By painting it repeatedly, and often in pots, Abu Shakra transformed it into a personal and national emblem of rootedness and displacement. These two works, produced in the final years of his life, also intersect with his struggle with illness, adding an intimate dimension to the cactus’s endurance.

Viewed together, the two canvases reveal the cactus as both vital and vulnerable. In one, it is muted and solitary, a stark silhouette that absorbs light. In the other, it sprouts flowers, its pot anchoring it within limits yet hinting at renewal. Both paintings hold tension between survival and restriction, reflecting the artist’s own experience of exile and mortality.

Through these variations on the cactus, Abu Shakra distilled complex questions of identity, estrangement, and resilience into deceptively simple forms. Last Cactus (Black Cactus) and Cactus stand not as opposites but as complements, as two facets of a single symbol that is at once national, personal, and deeply human. Together, they testify to how art can hold the marks of rupture while still carrying forward traces of endurance and renewal