Art & Culture

How Jenna Bitar Turned a One-Off Painting Into an International Art Career

BYKhaoula Ghanem

May 14, 2025

Jenna Bitar paints the way a Taurus lives: sensually, deliberately, with a deep reverence for beauty and the earth. She calls herself a homebody, someone who loves to decorate and surround herself with things that feel warm, lush, and grounded. Her art reflects all of that—organic forms, rich textures, and a palette that looks like it was plucked from a garden at golden hour. “I’m an Earth sign through and through,” she tells MILLE, “and that really feeds into everything I do—how I live, how I create. There’s this deep appreciation for the natural world, for balance and harmony.”

That energy is exactly what she’s brought to her new collaboration with the One&Only The Palm in Dubai. In a rare move, the luxury resort tapped the Lebanese-Balinese artist to outfit one of its villas with fifteen of her original works from May 13 to 30. The result? A tranquil, transportive space called Botanique, where bold pigments and sculptural textures transform walls into living landscapes.

Bitar’s work is on display at The One&Only The Palm until May 30. Courtesy of Art Korero

“It’s a celebration and an invitation to reconnect to nature,” she explains. “A remembrance of earth.” The show turns a private space into something far more experiential, as if each painting opens a portal to the landscapes they evoke—dried-up riverbeds, aerial views of desert terrain, delicate blooming florals clashing gently with jagged cliff faces. “There’s this duality I love,” she says, “between softness and rawness, between the elegance you find in nature and the rough erosion of it.”

The invitation came by way of Art Koréro, an agency Bitar has long admired. When founder Chimere Cisse visited her in Bali, where the part-Lebanese artist is based, the collaboration began to bloom organically. And that’s the thing about Bitar: very little in her life has been engineered. Her entire art career came together in much the same way—unexpected, intuitive, and completely unforced.

She didn’t go to art school. In fact, she never even considered becoming an artist. The first time she picked up a brush was on a random Saturday in her living room. “I painted something and my mom was like, ‘Wow, you need to make one for the cafés,'” she recalls. “So I did. And when I put it up, people started messaging the cafe asking, ‘Who’s the artist?'”

Friends encouraged her to create an Instagram account, one thing led to another, and suddenly she found herself flying to London, Paris, and New York—in the orbit of major international art fairs. But the turning point came in New York, in a completely unrelated business meeting. Bitar casually mentioned the story of her first painting, the one her mother had loved. The man across the table was intrigued. “He asked to see my work,” she says. “He saw the piece on Instagram and asked if I could make one for him. I had 24 hours left in New York. I went and bought a canvas, painted all night, called him the next day, and said, ‘It’s ready.'”

When she arrived at his home with the piece—still nervous, still new to all of it—he looked at the work, then looked at her. “He said, ‘Do you want your own gallery? Your own studio?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ That’s how I got my first solo show.”

That first exhibition led to more—in Manhattan, then Dubai, Munich, Paris, and Sydney. But despite the momentum, her process remains deeply introspective. “It’s all self-taught,” she says. “I don’t come into the studio with a plan. I go in blank. I sit. Sometimes I light incense, sometimes I put on music, and I enter this meditative state. I just allow whatever wants to come through to come through.”

Raised in Bali during the 1990s, when the island was still largely untouched by mass development, the 32-year-old grew up immersed in nature. “Nature isn’t just a theme in my work—it’s everything,” she says. “It’s a feeling. That feeling of spending time outdoors, of touching soil, of breathing deeply. I think we’ve lost that. We’re so disconnected from nature now. My art is a kind of resistance to that disconnection.”

Texture plays a key role in her paintings, often echoing the surfaces and shapes of the natural world—from cracked earth to volcanic ash. That elemental connection continues to pulse through her work—soft pinks reminiscent of rose petals; rugged, charcoal-like strokes echoing volcanic cliffs; aerial compositions that recall rivers snaking through desert landscapes.

Courtesy of Art Korero

Her rising profile recently caught the eye of Maison Margiela, who invited her to collaborate on a poetic campaign for their Replica fragrance line. “They gave me complete creative freedom,” she beams. “I wanted it to feel like walking through your grandmother’s garden,” she says. “I even made pigment from tomato leaves and volcanic sand. I love working with natural elements, things you can touch and smell.”

Beyond painting, Bitar also designs for her consciously-created resortwear label Ranaco, which she launched two years ago. “It’s mostly silk, hand-dyed and hand-printed. It feels like an extension of my art. Same colors, same philosophy. Earthy, organic, intuitive.”

There’s a calm in her presence, a thoughtfulness that permeates everything she does. “I love simplicity,” she says. “Not too many elements. I want to achieve a balance where the artwork feels complete without being overworked. It has to feel harmonious.”

And while her works from Botanique will be available through Art Korero for collectors, Bitar herself is already on to the next serendipitous chapter. She’s heading to Cannes, preparing for an upcoming show in Paris, and teasing a new project that, like most things in her life, came about entirely by surprise. She won’t reveal much, only that it was completely unplanned. “I didn’t chase it. It just came. The universe delivered.”

Bitar’s work is on display at The One&Only The Palm until May 30. Courtesy of Art Korero

How Jenna Bitar Turned a One-Off Painting Into an International Art Career

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How Jenna Bitar Turned a One-Off Painting Into an International Art Career

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