investigating modernism in the arab world
TRANSCRIPT
MARCH !!, "#!$ TO NOVEMBER "", "#!$
INVESTIGATING MODERNISM IN THE ARAB WORLD !"#$%&’'$%
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Barjeel Art Foundation Level Two, Maraya Art Centre Al Qasba, Sharjah, UAE
ISBN 978-1-907051-26-5Published by Art Advisory Associates Ltd.
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RE: ORIENT !
CuratorMandy Merzaban
English EditorDaliah Merzaban
Arabic EditorIsmail Rifai
Arabic TranslationIskandar Shaaban Partner Ad Services
ContributorsValerie Beheiry, Ph.D Patrick Kane, Ph.DDaliah Merzaban Salwa Mikdadi, Ph.DIsmail Rifai Sarah Rogers, Ph.D
PhotographyCapital D Studio
Book DesignWe Are Thought Fox Clint McLean, Una Jani!ijevi!, Tulip Hazbar
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Exhibition Statementt":6$% >6CJ
Patrick Kane interviews Dia Al Azzawi
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The Barjeel Art Foundation is an independent, United Arab Emirates-based initiative established to manage, preserve and exhibit the personal art collection of Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi.
The foundation’s guiding principle is to contribute to the intellectual development of the art scene in the Gulf region by building a prominent, publicly accessible art collection in the UAE. Part of this objective involves developing a public platform to foster critical dialogue around modern and contemporary art, with a focus on artists with Arab heritage internationally.
By hosting in-house exhibitions, lending artwork to international forums, producing print as well as online publications, and fashioning interactive public programmes, the Barjeel Art Foundation strives to serve as an informative resource for modern and contemporary art locally and on the global stage.
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RE: ORIENT )
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The decades between the 1950s and 1970s witnessed a surge of optimism following the independence of several Arab countries from European colonial domination. Beginning with Syria and Lebanon in the 1940s, Egypt, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia and Morocco achieved independence soon after while other Arab countries gained their freedom in the 1960s to early
‘70s. This optimism, buoyed by the 1956 nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the short-lived unification of Syria and Egypt (United Arab Republic) in 1958, was overshadowed by disillusion after the crippling Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. From an art historical standpoint, the backdrop of social and political turmoil epitomised a pivotal period of transition in region.
The artists in this exhibition belong to the second generation of Arab artists; they benefitted from newly established infrastructure for arts and education. Well versed in their cultural history and literary traditions, these artists actively engaged in critical discussions and debates around authenticity and modernism in Arab culture. They espoused social reform and freedom through the arts.
By the end of the 1970s, artists of this period were dis-enchanted with their governments’ policies, the failure of the social state in Egypt and the Arab modernist project (hadatha). The modernist discourse that peaked in the 1960s brought artists and writers together more so than in any
Foreword
By Salwa Mikdadi, Art Historian and Curator. Abu Dhabi, 2013./01 2345$67 2 89:; 8<=>?+ 8' @9A BC),D? E$FG
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Union of Arab Plastic Artists (1974 Arab Biennial). By 1967, Arab nationalism, socialism and secularism were seen as failed state ideologies and political Islam was on the rise.
This exhibition doesn’t claim to present a comprehensive survey of the period, neither does it offer a predetermined concept or impose thematic parameters. Rather, it encourages an appreciation of each work independent of the other. It seeks to reframe art of the period on each artist’s terms, style and influences. The artworks highlight the interests of the collector while also providing insight into discrepancies in the availability and sale of modern Arab art. For example, abstraction, an important development during this period, was not as popular in the first years of the Gulf art fairs in comparison with abstract expressionist art.
The limited number of women in the exhibition is neither intentional nor representative of the period; it is possibly due to the fact that fewer women artists from the modern period are available or presented through galleries and auction houses. It is of note that the Barjeel collection is growing fast with more pieces regularly added to further shape the foundation‘s reservoir of artwork. Almost half of the artworks in Re: Orient were made by artists early in their career, when most were 35 years old or younger. Such exceptional works provide us with clues on the influences that shaped the artists’ oeuvre in the period. The exhibition is a unique opportunity to look back on three decades of art production in the Arab world that were a critical signpost in the history of artistic production. We are grateful to the Barjeel Art Foundation for making it possible to study an important selection from this era.
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other period. Writers such as Jabra Ibrahim Jabra critiqued art, artists collaborated with poets such as Dia Al Azzawi and Adonis, while Fateh Al Moudarres wrote poetry, short stories and essays in addition to painting. The history of the region’s art boasts many new beginnings that took place during the 1960s and ‘70s, among them, the first Egyptian, Syrian and Iraqi Pavilions at the Venice Biennial. Meanwhile, a significant number of artists studied abroad with state-issued scholarships, while others attended newly established schools of art.
As reflected in their biographies, artists represented in this exhibition were founding members of major art collectives and associations in Egypt, Syria, Iraq and later across the Arab world. In the absence of curators, Arab artists organised exhibitions and were active members of these associations. While there were few collaborations on art projects between the artists, formal and informal artist collectives, groups or associations provided important platforms for peer review, for assisting emerging artists and for creating a space for discourse within which artists, as well as novelists, poets, journalists and others, could mingle and debate. Wars and regime changes sent many Arab artists into exile to the West and neighbouring Arab countries. The 1970s saw the last of the group exhibitions organised by the
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A photo of artists (left) Ismail Fattah, (centre) Dia Al Azzawi,and (right) Rafa Al Nasiri taken in Baghdad in the 1960s.
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populist rhetoric of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and secular nationalist Ba’ath parties in Iraq and Syria. The shift toward independence also gave way to forms of political domination and division. Art making often connects subjective experiences with the prevailing socio-political and cultural circumstances, and modernism in the Arab world epitomised a dynamic exchange of ideas. Modern-era artists with roots in Arab countries fused traditional approaches,
re-appropriated ancient symbolism, and employed Western avant-garde styles such as Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism and Dadaism to comment on daily life, politics and existential concerns. They were actively involved in the global dialogue and interpretation of modernism. This exhibition starts with the prefix RE:—a symbol signifying a ‘reply’ to an original message, and representing the ongoing, open-ended dialogue about past and present notions of otherness and the contrived categories that trap artists in narrow interpretations of identity and politics. RE: Orient is a conversation, persisting to this day, about the development of art in the 30-year period. As research of modern art in the Arab world evolves, the inherent nuances and guiding paradigms for modernity are continuously reviewed, replenished and reoriented.
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A repertoire of images has shaped understandings of Arab societies. Among these, Western illustrations of the Orient—a colonial term now deemed pejorative used to describe peoples, places and customs of the ‘Far East’—laid the groundwork for romanticised, mono-centric perceptions of countries in the Levant, North Africa, Arabian Gulf and Iraq. Depictions of idealised landscapes, opulence and violence became insignia that captured the agendas of Western observers more than the cultures themselves. Examining art production between the 1950s and 1970s, which for many Arab countries marked a pivotal period of transition from French and British imperialism, provides a glimpse into the subjective framework within which artists were operating. The residue of colonial rule engendered a wave of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ‘60s with the rise of Pan-Arab movements such as Nasserism, steered by the
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PK: Among your works collected by the Barjeel Art Foundation is your painting Mask of the Pretenders (1966). What is your reflection on this painting now that time has passed and based on your life experience? What was its original meaning and how do you view it today?
DA: In 1968, I was working in an Islamic archaeological site on the outskirts of Karbala city. Once I came across an area named, locally, Al Jo,. It was at the edge of the desert, and as soon as you left this area you entered Karbala city. The con-trast between this city with its lavish golden mosque and the desert with its vast emptiness inspired me in this painting, which I named in Arabic, Al Jo, (mask). The idea behind the work was to use Al Jo,, with its minimal landscape, as a mask to a city that is very rich with regard to its historical mythology and its importance in the Iraqi society.
How I view it today? It simply takes me back to the days when I was working in the field of archaeology; to the days
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this support. Cultural centres were forced to close, and sup-port for artists dwindled.
PK: The recent showing of your mural Elegy to My Trapped City (also known as Ode to My City) at Meem Gallery in Dubai allowed us to view again this powerful interpretation of the destruction of Iraq following the invasion by American forces in 2003. Is the form of the large painted mural intended to con-front the viewer with a scale that presents more than the eye
can take in all at once?
DA: Because of the scale of the destruction, I felt that I had only one option, to create a large painting that could communicate the pain and loss of thousands of Iraqi people. It would also be better in creating a dialogue with the viewer, to focus their mind on the topics that I was dealing with.
PK: For me, the use of black and white, the content and gen-eral form of Ode to My City, calls to mind Picasso’s epic mural, Guernica (1937). Were you seeking to awaken the viewer’s memory of this other work in drawing attention to the plight of victims of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre or of the destructive results of invasions to the residents of Baghdad? DA: My understanding is that many artists use black as a dominant colour, Picasso among them. During the ‘90s, when I was producing work about Iraq under the title Bilad Al Awad (including Ode to my City) I started to restrain myself from using the colours that had previously dominated my paintings.
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when I was working with other artists doing our utmost to push the Iraqi art movement to a new border.
PK: In your experience, how has the institutional base and sup-port for artists changed in Iraq? When you began, what were the options and paths for artists, art instructors or others to seek a career in the arts and how has that changed now for the generations that followed?
DA: My first exhibition was in 1964. At that time, we had no support at all from the government, the sole exception being that the Ministry of Information might, from time to time, buy one painting for the Museum of Modern Art. After the start of the ‘70s, the government started to become more open and two major projects followed: the Monument of the Unknown Soldier by Khalid Al Rahhal, and the Monument of the Martyr by Ismail Fattah. The government also began to sup-port and to finance a number of conferences and festivals of Arab art, and to instigate the opening of Iraqi cultural centres across the world. By the end of the ‘70s, the government had started to use art as a political tool. This led to a yearly exhi-bition that gradually became an alternative to that held by the Iraqi Artists Society.
PK: To what extent did the crises that ensued in Iraq from the late 1970s change the government’s support for the arts?
DA: Following the start of the war with Iran in September 1980, the Iraqi government continued to support international exhibitions as a way to distract from the destruction and con-sequences of conflict. However, due to the length and cost of the war, by the mid-1980s it had become di-cult to maintain
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many international artists have expressed their outrage against, from Marc Quinn and Richard Serra to Botero. I think that the Abu Ghraib images were shocking not simply because they were authorised and legitimised by the government, but also because they portray the real face of occupation.
PK: In the absence of institutions, how does the experience of art shift? What form and expression are found when there is less open support?
DA: Most cultural institutions in Arab countries are very weak and reflect the interests of their governments. However, since cultural organisations must work within the limitations of ;their society, any future development of the arts will have to emerge out of these factors.
PK: To what extent has the discussion of modern art in Iraq been too focused on Baghdad? How can we understand the artistic experience in other cities and regions?
DA: Baghdad is like Cairo or Damascus. It has always been the centre of cultural activity, and artistic experience from outside the capital has gone mostly unnoticed. This is because most governments in the Middle East place greater emphasis on the capital in all aspects of life.
PK: With all of the life experience you have gained, how has your philosophy of art changed?
DA: The most important thing is not to invest too heavily in the fashions of the moment. I would rather challenge myself through new works, which I feel the need to create.
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Exhibition catalogue featuring Mask of the Pretenders (1966) for Dia Al Azzawi's Retrospective show at the Iraqi Artist Society Hall in Baghdad, 1967.
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This is out of respect to the thousands who lost their lives, but is also to remind the viewer of the plight of the victims, to focus their attention on the topics raised by the art.
PK: In the Art in Iraq series you curated with Charles Pocock, one prevailing theme was your reflection on the changing role and utility of arts in relation to the state. Was there a loss of artistic autonomy as the state dominated produc-tion of art during the later period of Saddam Hussein’s rule?
What is the role of art in exile as a form of resistance?
DA: The domination of the state pro-duces a lot of a propagandist and shal-low works; these are also either neutral toward current events, or represen-tative of a very personal view, so that after many years it has become dif-ficult to find serious works that can reflect the trauma and anxieties of Iraqi
society. The real role of artists in exile is to prioritise change, to document these past traumas, but also to celebrate the endurance of the Iraqis.
PK: What is your reaction to the widespread looting of Iraqi art, archaeological museums and sites that happened while Iraq was under American occupation?
DA: The occupation force disregards the humanity and heri-tage of Iraqis. It presents a view of itself, one of democracy and human rights that is at odds with its actions. What hap-pened in the Abu Ghraib prison was a shameful act which
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Formal explorations in colour and light reflect the artistic pedigree of one of Lebanon’s most-important modernist artists, Chafic Abboud. Born in Bikfaya, Lebanon in 1926, Abboud produced a versatile and prolific body of work that crosses a variety of media: oil painting, ink, watercolour, ceramics and artists’ books. His practice reveals an intense
interest in the materiality of the medium at the heart of international modernism. At the Académie Libanaise
des Beaux-Arts, Abboud studied under Lebanese painter Cesar Gemayal, a student of Khalil Saleeby, friend and colleague to American Impressionist John Singer Sargent.
In 1947, Abboud travelled to Paris, where he continued his training in the atelier of André Lhote and Fernard Léger.
While he began his career as a figurative painter, Abboud’s practice transformed into one based in lyrical abstraction by 1948. In 1952, he received a Lebanese government scholarship to study drawing and engraving at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Nine years later, Abboud was awarded the French Prix Victor Choquet and in 1964 the Prix du Salon d’Automne from Lebanon’s Sursock Museum. Paris-based Insti-tute du Monde Arabe hosted a major retrospective of Abboud’s work in 2011, which Beirut Art Centre featured in 2012.
C h a F i C a b b o u d
Bikfaya, Lebanon, 1926-2004Kurdish Family, oil on board46.7 x 29.4 cm, 1950s
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The subject of several government commis-
sioned art projects, the construction of the Aswan
High Dam became a defining ambition of Arab
nationalist rhetoric.
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A pioneer of Egyptian modern art, Ragheb Ayad endeavoured to cultivate a distinctly Egyptian artistic identity with works that portrayed the many animated layers of daily life, local folklore and popular culture. Ayad, who made important contributions to expressionism in Egypt, was an influential member of the first graduating class of Cairo’s School of Fine Arts, started in 1908. In his early work in the 1920s, Ayad – who used painting, draw-ing and watercolour – featured landscapes in the North African country and silhouetted figures painted on cardboard with oil.
A renewed sense of national identity was forming in the back-drop of Ayad’s practice, as the 1919 revolution and subsequent independence from British occupation three years later trans-formed Egypt’s political environment. The artist received the first-ever government scholarship to study art at Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti in 1925, after which he returned to Cairo as director of the College of Applied Arts. Ayad’s 1960s piece Aswan emphatically depicts the use of manual labour in con-structing the Aswan High Dam. In later years, artists and writers questioned the loss of life on one of the 20th century’s greatest engineering projects, but in this painting we find an interpreta-tion that leaves the viewer to question the relationship between labour and machinery. Ayad, who exhibited regularly in Cairo’s salon scene and exhibitions held by the Society of Art Connois-seurs, became director of Cairo’s Museum of Modern Art in 1950.
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Cairo, Egypt, 1892-1982Aswan, oil on board155 x 55 cm, 1964
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Baghdad, Iraq, 1939Mask of the Pretenders, oil on canvas86 x 66.5 cm, 1966
Poetry and folkloric memory drawn from ancient and con-temporary Iraqi and Arab histories resonate in the artwork of internationally renowned Dia Al Azzawi. Al Azzawi’s acute understanding of antiquity and cultural heritage is evident in paintings, sculptures and prints that capture historical moments, often on a monumental scale. The artist’s awareness
and sensitivity to representations of human su,ering and turmoil carry through his work, as does his attempt to
interlace space and time to demonstrate the eternal solidarity between di,erent cultures and civilisa-tions. In Mask of the Pretenders (1966), Al Azzawi embedded symbols of human form, including a
hand and a masked face, against deep and dark tones of black and gray.
The artist, who received degrees in archaeology from the Uni-versity of Baghdad in 1962 and fine arts from Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1964, worked at Iraq’s Department of Antiquities until 1976, and has since resided in London. Founder of the piv-otal Iraqi art group New Vision in 1969, he was also part of One Dimension founded by Shakir Hassan Al Said.
Among Al Azzawi’s renowned works is the iconic mural Sabra and Shatila (1982-1985), part of the Tate Modern collection, reflecting on the massacre of Palestinian refugees by the Leba-nese Christian Phalangist militia during the 1982 Israeli invasion.
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Untitled, oil on canvas61 x 45 cm, 1964
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Untitled, mixed media on card48 x 43 cm, 1976
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Article on Ahmed Cherkaoui in L’art Maghrebin, 1961.
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Ahmed Cherkaoui is remembered as one of Morocco’s most-prominent modern artists, whose work has been exhibited worldwide to great acclaim and is held in prominent collections such as Institute du Monde Arabe and Musee d’Art Moderne, both in Paris. Born in Boujad, at the foot of the Atlas Mountains, Cherkaoui began his artistic training with a calligrapher in Casa-blanca before leaving for Paris shortly following Morocco’s 1956 independence. After studying at the Ecole des Metiers d’Art and Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he spent a year at Warsaw’s College of Fine Arts in 1961.
Cherkaoui’s art reflects these cultural experiences. Known for large canvases that are both abstract and symbolically rich, the artist created a distinct modernist aesthetic by drawing on a number of artistic traditions—from Amazigh tattooing and tra-ditional prayer mats to the techniques and formal languages of 21st century Polish and French avant-garde artists. Often paint-ing on burlap, Cherkaoui endows his work with materiality and texture, suggesting both a tactile and visual experience. His art is also recognised for its layers of vibrantly coloured symbols and forms, symmetrically arranged against a dark background, a technique that enhances the painting’s sense of depth.
a h m e d C h e r K a o u i
Boujad, Morocco, 1934-1967Les Miroirs Rouges, oil on jute on board 23.5 x 28.5 cm, 1965
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Combining modernist sensibilities with a reflective impression-ist style, artist Nassir Choura was instrumental to the develop-ment of Syrian modern art and the emergence of a dynamic art scene in Damascus in the 1950s and 1960s.
Choura’s technique transformed over the course of his career from literal impressionistic landscapes to pure abstraction. Influenced by Syrian impressionist artist Michel Kirsha, Choura, who studied painting at the School of Fine Arts in Cairo from 1943-1947, introduced abstraction after his collaboration with Fateh Al Moudarres in 1964. He returned to a representa-tional style in 1970 with an emphasis on realism, while his 1980s works expressed a combination of both periods. The painting Landscape (1960) captures Choura’s technique on the cusp of his transition into abstraction. Rendering an idyllic lake scene, the artist instills a tranquil setting that hints at only a slight ges-ture of movement with a distant sailboat. Traces of a lingering sunset are revealed in warm reflections in the water, sweeping mauve in the mountains and a yellowing sky.
Choura was part of the founding faculty at the University of Damascus’ fine arts department in 1960, teaching there for 30 years. Syria’s National Museum of Antiquities features some of his work.
n a S S i r C h o u r a
Damascus, Syria, 1920-1992Landscape, oil on canvas220 x 220 cm, 1960s
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Born in Baghdad in 1914, Hafidh Al Droubi made several important contributions to the history of modern art in Iraq, including the establishment of Baghdad’s first free atelier in 1942 and the 1953 founding of the artist collective, The Impressionists. Dedicated to art education more so than a
particular style or mode of working, the Impressionists encompassed artists practicing in a variety of styles
and techniques.
Al Droubi’s own paintings are characterised by an interest in scenes of Iraqi daily life, executed in a technique that moved from an Impressionist focus
on the e,ects of light on form to one that experi-mented with Cubism’s fragmentation of space.
Like many of his predecessors and colleagues in the Arab world, Al Droubi travelled abroad to Rome in 1936 for train-ing. In 1940, he returned to Baghdad for a few months before continuing his studies at London’s Goldsmith College, gradu-ating in 1950. Upon his return to the Iraqi capital, he was an active member of the city’s growing art scene, chairing the Iraqi Plastic Artists for six years and serving as the dean of the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad.
h a F i d h a l d r o u b i
Baghdad, Iraq, 1914-1991Watermelon Sellers, oil on canvas61 x 41 cm, 1969
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One of Fattah’s best-known works is the
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comimissioned to hon-our soldiers who died in
the Iran-Iraq war.
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Rendering the inexpressible qualities of human conscious-ness through sculpture and paint, Ismail Fattah blurs the lines between abstraction and representation. Born in Basra, Iraq, Fattah is best known for designing Nusb Al-Shahid, (Monument of the Martyr) in Baghdad: a public artwork commissioned in the early 1980s to commemorate fallen soldiers of the 1979-88 Iran-Iraq War. Often mingling form with intangible ideas of human consciousness, Fattah’s artwork presents a dilemma between figuration and its negation. In his untitled 1965 sculp-ture, Fattah depicts limb-like supports for a rectangular core, obscuring any decisive representation. Although he worked pri-marily in sculpture, close friend and artist Dia Al Azzawi recalls Fattah’s painting practice “relieved a spiritual tension” when he couldn’t realise ideas through three-dimensional form.
A student of prolific Iraqi artist Jewad Salim at Baghdad’s Insti-tute of Fine Arts in 1958, Fattah studied sculpture at Accademia di Belle Arti and ceramics at San Jacmo Academy in Rome. He returned to teach ceramics at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1965 and later sculpture in 1969. Fattah was a founding member of influential collective New Vision and the Baghdad Modern Art Group. Fattah was diagnosed with cancer while living in Qatar near the end of his life. When Fattah’s condition worsened, his family chartered a plane for him to return to Iraq, where he passed away hours after his arrival.
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Basra, Iraq, 1938-2004Untitled, bronze36.3 x 16.8 x 26.5 cm, 1965
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Mascara, Algeria, 1919-1996 Rêve, oil on canvas 73.5 x 92.5 cm, 1975
Abstract shapes and subdued colour schemes dominate the canvases of Abdel Kader Guermaz, a major player in Algeria’s modern art movement. Guermaz, who graduated from l’École des Beaux-Arts d’Oran in 1940, emigrated to Paris in 1961 amid his home country’s eruptive struggle for independence from France, which succeeded the following year. The artist, who became associated with School of Paris, befriended French art-ists such as Bissière, Manessier, Bazaine and Vieira da Silva. Sub-tlety and minimalism characterise Guermaz’ artistic approach, giving form to his spiritual meditations and inspiring French art critic Pierre Rey to call him the painter of silence and light.
Although his most-disciplined work consists of textured white monochrome paintings, Guermaz began incorporating discern-ible shapes and softened segments of colour after 1975. His careful compositions emerge as weightless and timeless land-scapes evoking both interior and exterior spaces. His work Rêve features, perhaps inadvertently, an anthropomorphic shape resembling a woman in profile. Attaining critical success in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artist was largely forgotten upon the 1981 closure of gallery Entremonde that represented him. Until his death in 1996, Guermaz continued to produce work probing the metaphysical relationship between visible world and the unseen. His artwork, featured in international museum col-lections, has been rediscovered in posthumous shows and texts.
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The paintings and drawings of renowned artist Paul Guiragos-sian reflect the nuances of the human condition with radiant complexity through colour, form and careful abstraction. Born into a family of Armenian descent in Jerusalem, Guiragossian’s art reflected on themes of Palestinian exile, collective struggle, kinship and representations of the maternal. His line drawings
exhibit masterful renderings of gesture with fluid outlines of clothed figures, while his paintings reckon human form
through thick, elongated brush strokes.
In 1942, the artist studied painting at Jerusalem’s Yarkon Studio before emigrating to Lebanon in
1948 during the Arab-Israeli war. The son of a single mother, Guiragossian revisits the theme of mother
and child in a vivid spectrum of hues and gestures, show-ing his reverence for the roles of women as virtuous caretak-ers at the crux of every society. On this theme, Guiragossian wrote, “The woman is constantly present in my paintings, my drawings, because she is Love, Childhood, Su!ering and Peace. She is the one who is against sending her son and husband to wars.”
Guiragossian, who pursued a scholarship at the Academic di Belle Arti in Florence in 1957, won First Prize at the 1958 Paris Biennale and the 1961 Florence Biennale. Lebanon held a state funeral in Beirut for Guiragossian upon his death in 1993.
P a u l g u i r a g o S S i a n
Jerusalem, Palestine, 1926–1993Madonna and Child, oil on canvas71 x 59 cm, Early 1960s
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Group with Flowers, Oil on canvas55 x 45 cm, 1963
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Artist Abbas Al Musavi depicts the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, leader of the Shi’a Muslims and grandson of the Prophet
Muhammad (pbuh) in the his late 19th-early
20th century piece Battle of Karbala (680 ce [10th
of Muharram, ah 61]).
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Weaving together poetry, allegory and pastoral landscapes, the artwork of Kadim Haidar captures the murmurs of Iraqi socio-political history through symbolism and metaphor. The writer, poet and artist painted in a variety of styles, from natural land-scapes of Iraq to abstract still life and figures. His work exam-ined important shifts in Iraq’s political environment in the 1950s and 1960s, including the military-backed coup that toppled the monarchy in 1958, giving power to the Ba’ath party, a Pan-Arab secular nationalist group that gave form to the rise of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late ‘70s.
One of Haidar’s most-notable series of paintings, Melhamet Al Shahidi (The Martyr’s Epic), was based on a poem he wrote in 1965. The series, including a painting in this exhibition, ref-erences the Battle of Karbala that brought the defeat of Al Husayn ibn Ali by the Umayyad, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh). Haidar re-contexualises the melancholy of annual mourning rituals performed to commemorate Al Husayn’s martyrdom with luminous weeping white horses.
After studying art in Baghdad in the 1950s, Haidar pursued theatre design and graphics at the Royal School of Art and Graphics in London. He returned to Iraq in 1962, founding the department of design at the Institute of Fine Arts and chairing its visual arts department.
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Baghdad, Iraq, 1932-1985Martyr’s Epic, oil on canvas91 x 127 cm, 1965
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Il Nous a Dit Comment Cela s’est passé Oil on canvas96 x 65 cm, 1957
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Cairo, Egypt, 1929Marie Nilus, bronze146 x 40 x 22 cm, 1969
Born in 1929 into a family of metalworkers, Egyptian sculp-tor Adam Henein modelled a clay figure of Ramses II at the age of eight. That marked the beginning of an artistic jour-ney that catapulted Henein onto the international art scene. Celebrated for his sculptural work in bronze, wood, clay and granite, Henein transforms solid material into ethereal pres-
ences through the use of simple lines, capturing the essen-tials of modernist form. Distinguishing his body of work
is the way in which the artist interweaves universal themes—motherhood, birds, boats and prayer among them—with references to Egyptian icons such as pyramids, obelisks, Pharaonic kings and hieroglyphs. Henein also draws on his heritage in
abstract and representational paintings, a series of which are completed on papyrus, and share with his
sculptures a poetic simplicity of visual form.
After receiving a degree in Sculpture from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1953, Henein continued his training in Munich and Paris, where he lived for 25 years until 1996. Since return-ing to Egypt, Henein has contributed greatly to the country’s cultural landscape, particularly in Aswan, where he founded the city’s annual International Sculpture Symposium. Henein has received numerous awards for his work, which has been exhibited in Egypt, the Arab world, Europe and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Citing scenes from daily life, the paintings of Naim Ismail con-tributed to a movement in Syria to cultivate a sense of national consciousness through visual culture. Born in the northwestern city of Antioch, Ismail moved south during Syria’s annexation by Turkey in 1939. Syria’s independence from French mandate in 1944 ushered in a peak period of art production where artists experimented with numerous techniques, styles and subjects.
Ismail’s older brother Adham, although better known despite his early death, was one of the first modern artists to break free from purely representational artwork by integrating calligraphic signs and abstraction. Ismail’s practice connects past and pres-ent through depictions of everyday life, using modernist sen-sibilities and referencing traditional design. In his 1956 untitled painting, Ismail captures a village scene with a man in traditional Arab attire sitting idly on a doorstep, while a fully veiled woman enters the foreground with a sack of dried goods. His genre scenes often combine Islamic influences, including geometric motifs and defined representational forms.
After receiving formal art training in Istanbul and Rome, Ismail settled in Damascus to work as an artistic director for a maga-zine before acceding to a high post within the Ministry of Culture in the 1970s.
n a i m i S m a i l
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Employing an expressive yet stylised approach, Saadi Al Kaabi’s paintings draw from the rich and diverse reservoir of Iraqi art and heritage. His art in the 1960s experimented with Cubism and Expressionism, as the simplified planes and strong outlines of this untitled portrait demonstrate. Marrying aesthetic influ-ences from Cubism with those from Sumerian, Assyrian, Baby-lonian and Islamic art, Al Kaabi’s work explores the nuances and contradictions of the human condition.
Born in Najaf, Al Kaabi is a significant member of Iraq’s second generation of modernist artists. A graduate of Baghdad’s Insti-tute of Fine Arts in 1960, the artist’s signature style emerged in the 1970s after two decades of involvement in the avant-garde modern art scene. Al Kaabi applies thick layers of paint in his contemporary art, using ginger earth tones to compose highly textured works. His practice forms part of a broader post-inde-pendence artistic approach in the Arab world concerned with fashioning a new national identity that involved looking to the past in search of cultural authenticity.
Al Kaabi has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 1976 Venice Biennale. In the 1980s, he torched his personal archive of press clippings covering his career as a way of expunging the suggestion of his success to start anew.
S a a d i a l K a a b i
Najaf , Iraq, 1937Untitled, oil on board60 x 49 cm, 1962
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Depictions of banal daily struggles and the social and physi-cal deprivation of the masses intertwine the artwork of Syrian painter Louay Kayyali during his iconic, short-lived career.
The Aleppo-born artist began painting at the age of 11 and held his first solo show at 18. Highlighting the individual struggles
evident on the fringe of larger socio-political realities in the Arab region, Kayyali’s artwork provides a window
into the lives of the deprived majority. His signa-ture technique of painting on masonite chip board contributed to the worn-yet-resolute nature of the solidly defined figures appearing on his canvases,
often with quiet downcast gazes. Woman Sewing captures a fleeting moment of a seamstress’ ascetic
routine of stitching clothing.
Kayyali, who secured a scholarship in 1956 to study at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts, participated in a range of fairs during his time in Italy, including representing Syria in along with Fateh Al Moudarres at the 1960 Venice Biennale. After the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War with Israel in 1967, Kayyali sank into a deep depression and destroyed a series of politically charged char-coal drawings that epitomised the Arab struggle. Su,ering from psychological distress and addiction through his 30s, Kayyali stopped painting until the early 1970s. The artist died tragically in a fire at the age of 44 in what some of have deemed a suicide.
l o u a y K a y y a l i
Aleppo, Syria, 1934–1978Woman Sewing, oil on engineered wood121.5 x 121.5 x 5.5, 1974
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Mohammed Khadda is considered one of the founding fathers of modern and contemporary art in Algeria. Synthesising west-ern painting techniques with the fluidity of Arabic writing, Khadda represents a generation of Algerian artists who wove together calligraphic heritage and the formal language of West-ern abstraction through the 1950s. Forging a distinct Algerian artistic practice became more critical in the aftermath of the country’s independence from France in 1962. The political tran-sition influenced the founding in 1967 of art movements known as ‘Aouchem’, Arabic for tattoo, and School of the Sign, of which Khadda was an active participant.
Often working with a palette of earth tones, Khadda creates tactile compositions that layer Arabic writing and calligraphy over atmospheric abstract canvases. A self-taught painter, Khadda was born in Mostaganem. In 1953, he travelled to Paris, where he spent a decade before returning to Algeria. Khadda was a founding member of the National Union of the Visual Arts, established in 1964, and participated in producing a num-ber of collective murals during the 1970s. In addition to exhib-iting regularly in Algeria and abroad, Khadda illustrated novels and books of poetry for several well-known Algerian writers, including Rachid Boudjedra.
m o h a m m e d K h a d d a
Mostaganem, Algeria, 1930-1991Abstraction vert, oil on canvas54 x 45 cm, 1969
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Combining Kurdish folklore and symbolism, the artwork of Ismail Al Khayat encodes ideas of collective struggle and political iso-lation. Born in Khanaqin, northern Iraq, Al Khayat is an inspira-tional figure among Kurdish intellectuals and artists. Rendered in a naïve style, Al Khayat’s mixed-media collage Those Who Watch Other People Will Die of Envy (1965) observes superstitions sur-rounding the evil eye citing common expressions and symbols from the Middle East and North Africa.
Al Khayat illustrates a hamsa, an emblem containing a right hand with an eye, and confronts the viewer with the artwork’s Arabic title, questioning their moral judgement and gaze. Representa-tions of birds as metaphors for freedom and the fragility of life are recurrent themes in Al Khayat’s artwork. Referencing Kurdish and Iraqi folklore, he investigates the progressive socio-political isolation of Iraq’s Kurdish population. In a series commemorating former President Saddam Hussein’s notorious Al Anfal campaign, which used chemical weapons on Kurdish cities and destroyed some 2,000 villages in the late 1980s, Al Khayat depicts abstracted phantom-like birds flying away from dead bodies.
The artist joined the Society of Iraqi Plastic Arts in 1965 before graduating from the Teachers College at Baquba in 1966. In 1992, he became art director at the Ministry of Culture in the Kurdistan Region.
i S m a i l a l K h a y a t
Khanaqin, Iraq, 1944Those Who Watch Other People Will Die of EnvyInk, gouache, foil and collage on paper21 x 28.2 cm, 1965
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Religious symbolism laced in sensitive renderings of ordinary people in Syria resounds in the artwork of prolific modernist artist Fateh Al Moudarres. Aleppo-born Al Moudarres is con-sidered an important leader in Syria’s modern and surrealist art movements, culling forms from Assyrian antiquity, as well as Christian and Muslim symbolism. He employs a recognisable expressionist style that touches on themes of kinship, social deprivation, modernisation and rural society.
The artist studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome from 1954-1960 and at Paris-based Ecole des Beaux Arts in the early 1970s, later becoming an influential teacher at the University of Damascus. The countryside of Aleppo where Al Moudarres spent his childhood echoes in the colours and textures of his landscape paintings.
Following the 1960s agricultural crisis, Al Moudarras moved to Damascus. Confronted with a growing labour class and the Syrian capital’s overcrowded living spaces, Al Moudarras’ work referenced stark living conditions, often featuring clustered statuesque figures with limited mobility. In Icons of Moudarres (1962), the artist drew on symbols and surrealist techniques, a hallmark of his work in this period.
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Aleppo, Syria, 1922-1999Icons of Moudarres, oil and gold leaf on canvas129 x 68 cm, 1962
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Ahmed Moustafa draws on his deep faith and scholarly knowl-edge of the science of Arabic script to create absorbing works that have achieved international recognition: classical Ara-bic poetry transformed into zoomorphic images; a single Arabic letter reverberating across the surface into swirling arabesques; Quranic verses that call forth divine power. Pre-ceding this signature body of work was a series drawing on Moustafa’s neoclassical European training in Egypt. Strikingly di,erent, the earlier paintings are often figurative and thus represent a lesser-known yet equally important moment in Moustafa’s practice.
Born in Alexandria in 1943, the artist began his studies in 1961 at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Architecture at Alexandria Uni-versity. He then established a prominent reputation as a figura-tive painter in Egypt, before continuing his training in London, where he received a Master’s degree and doctorate from St. Martin’s College of Art and Design. It was during this period of research that Moustafa’s inspiration shifted focus to Islam’s highest art form: calligraphy. His visually arresting penmanship has been translated into the media of painting, stained glass, silkscreen and tapestries. Since 1974, Moustafa has resided in London and in 1983 he founded the Fe-Noon Ahmed Moustafa Research Centre for Arab Art and Design.
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Alexandria, Egypt, 1943 Portrait of a Poet, oil on canvas 117 x 79 cm, 1969
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Kuwait, 1941–2003 Untitled, oil on panel 100 x 155 cm, 1964
A pioneer of Kuwait’s modern art movement, Abdallah Al Qassar is known for his depictions of scenes that draw on Arab culture and heritage.
This 1964 untitled painting captures Al Qassar’s interest in Kuwaiti fishing life on the Arabian Gulf. The 1968 painting Tandeef Al Hinta also depicts a moment of work: a young girl shifting grain. In both works, the repetitive act of manual labour is conveyed through perspective, compositional simplicity and colour palette. Covering the surface of the canvas of Tandeef Al Hinta are Al Qassar’s signature swirling, seemingly intercon-nected lines, which create an all over pattern that infuses his compositions with dynamic depth and movement.
It is this combined use of line and colour that mark Al Qas-sar as one of Kuwait’s most-technically versatile artists, one who began exhibiting in during the late 1950s. In 1962, he continued his training at Cairo’s School of Fine Arts, spend-ing nearly a decade in Egypt after receiving a scholarship from the Kuwaiti government. Upon returning, Al Qassar served as the treasurer of Kuwait’s Free Atelier from 1971 until 1982. He participated in more than 50 exhibitions throughout the Arab world and Europe.
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Tandeef Al Hinta, oil on canvas 97 x 78 cm, 1968
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Mecca, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, 1939–2006Still Life with Fish, oil and sand on masonite33 x 46 cm, 1975
References to Saudi Arabia’s desert life, folklore and traditional architecture characterise the art of Abdul-Halim Radwi, one of the kingdom’s most-respected artists. Born in the holy city of Mecca, Radwi was among a generation of artists who witnessed the establishment of Saudi Arabia’s first modern art associa-tions in the late 1960s. Among the first Saudi artists sponsored to pursue a degree in art abroad, Radwi’s work is guided by both modernist sensibilities and cultural heritage.
Radwi is perhaps best known for 15 monumental outdoor sculptures adorning the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, includ-ing Inkwell, Pen and Paper, which reproduces these objects on a large scale. The artist also engaged with the still life genre as in the 1975 painting, Still Life with Fish, in which he uses paint and sand to produce a flattened image of two fish in a loose geometric composition. Signing the piece with both Arabic and Latin script demonstrates that Radwi was painting for an inter-national audience. While the Arabian Peninsula took steps to endorse the arts later than in some neighbouring Arab coun-tries, from the 1960s important art institutions emerged in Saudi Arabia. Radwi, who obtained a doctorate from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1979, was director of Jed-dah’s Centre for Fine Arts from 1968 to 1974.
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Representations of Egyptian daily life infused with surrealism and symbolism characterise the artwork of Samir Rafi, who emphatically captured the surrealist movement spearheaded by Ramsis Yunan and Georges Henein. Rafi was a prominent member of the Contemporary Art Group, an artist collective founded in 1946 that emphasised the relationship of art to soci-ety and popular culture and adapted modern forms and tech-nique. The artist received critical acclaim during the 1950s from Aimé Azar, a teacher of aesthetics at Ain Shams University, who noted how Rafi accentuated the tragedy of modern life.
In a famous work Les Gardes du Mokattam (Guardians of the Mokattam), Rafi represented figures assembled near the hills in Southern Cairo, a known gathering place for Sufis prior to the 1952 revolutionary coup.
After attending secondary school under the famous art teacher Hussayn Yusuf Amin, Rafi became a graduate of the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. He earned advanced degrees in art and pursued Ph.D studies in art history at the Sorbonne. Exhibiting widely and taking part in numerous international exhibitions during this period, Rafi later returned to Cairo to assume a role as an art professor at the School of Fine Arts and engage in art journalism.
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Cairo, Egypt, 1926-2004Seated Musician, oil and mixed media on board50 x 68.2 cm, 1963
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Group of Figures in a Village, oil on canvas60 x 80 cm, 1966
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The theme of the traditional Iraqi town is constantly revisited in the paintings of seminal Iraqi artist Nouri Al Rawi. Born in Rawa in 1925, the artist witnessed Baghdad’s emergence as a vibrant art centre in the 1950s.
Merging representation and abstraction, Al Rawi’s poetic depictions of Iraq’s natural and urban landscapes draw
on personal experience and memory. Often referenc-ing the whitewashed architecture of his hometown, Al Rawi instils a dreamlike quality in his paintings through distilled colours and textures, often inte-grating poetry to provide an element of cultural
location and metaphor. His work relates to a larger critical debate in the Arab World about post-indepen-
dence identity and cultural authenticity.
Al Rawi played a pivotal role in the development of modern Iraqi art, founding the National Museum of Modern Art and spearheading several government-sponsored art initiatives in the 1980s. A 1959 graduate of Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, the artist was the first to establish literature and arts pages in the Iraqi press. Al Rawi, in addition to his many solo exhibitions at home and abroad, has authored several books including Reflections on Modern Iraqi Art published in 1962. His profound contributions to Iraq’s cultural development have been recog-nised in post-war Iraq by the highest levels of government.
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Rawa, Iraq, 1925 Untitled, oil on canvas160 x 84 cm, 1957
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An architect, printmaker, painter and designer, Issam Al Said dedicated his artistic practice to both to the craft of traditional design and the incorporation of modern aesthetics. Despite being the son of controversial Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al Said, who dominated the nation’s politics from 1930-1958, Al Said dedicated his life to the arts. His creative practice and personal life were informed by the relationship between Muslim spiritu-ality and the scientific principles inherent in Islamic arts. In the painting entitled, We Made Every Living Thing of Water, the art-ist reflects on a quote from the Holy Quran referring to the cre-ation of living beings consisting of mainly water.
Al Said studied architecture at Cambridge University from 1958 to 1961, during which time he created an emotionally charged painting, The Head of Christ, after his father was executed, and reportedly crucified, amid a purge in Iraq. While studying for a doctorate on Methodology of Geometric Proportioning in Islamic Architecture, Al Said passed away in 1988 at the age of 49. Although unfinished, segments of his research were posthumously published in articles on Islamic architecture geometric design.
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Baghdad, Iraq, 1938-1988We Made Every Living Thing of WaterOil and mixed media on canvas75.5 x 63 cm, 1962
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group founded by Shakir Hassan Al Said.
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One of Iraq’s most-revered artists Shakir Hassan Al Said pro-duced abstract artwork inspired by the principles of Islamic Sufism. The Samawah-born artist regarded artistic expression as an act of sacred contemplation, and he developed an art philosophy known as Al Bua’d Al Wahid, or One Dimension, rep-resenting the area between the visible world and the invisible realm of God. Al Said’s paintings and mixed-media works often sought to give a glimpse into this dimension. He believed con-templating the glory of God caused the personal self to disinte-grate into the eternal one.
Al Said pursued a degree in social sciences at the Higher Insti-tute of Teachers in Baghdad and in painting from the Institute of Fine Arts, later studying at Paris’ Académie Julien, the École des Arts Décoratifs and the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Taught by prolific Iraqi artist Jewad Selim, both artists founded Baghdad Modern Art group in 1951. Al Said inspired many artists in his generation to create a distinct Iraqi style that was simul-taneously modern and traditional. Other than Sufism, Al Said’s art was rooted in Western modern thought, including structur-alism, semiotics, deconstructionism, phenomenology and exis-tentialist theory. His approach often toys with the sense of time, appearing ancient while containing elements, such as gra-ti and splashes of paint, that bring it into the modern context.
S h a K i r h a S S a n a l S a i d
Samawah, Iraq, 1925-2004Untitled, oil and plaster on board66.5 x 56.5 cm, 1963
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The career of artist Walid Al Shami has spanned 40 prolific years, during which time he has become recognised for paint-ings that depict in real and fantastical imagery his hometown of Homs, Syria. Al Shami began his studies in 1966 at the Subhi Shoeib Center for the Plastic Arts before continuing his training at Damascus University, where he graduated from the Printing and Etching division in 1975. He was the first artist to exhibit in the open air in Syria in 1973.
The 1972 painting, Maryam, is emblematic of Al Shami’s prac-tice. In addition to his interest in depicting the architecture and city life of Homs, Al Shami has continually returned to the motif of the female figure since the early 1970s. In Maryam, Al Shami organises the composition through blocks of colour. Yet it is the female figure, framed by an arbor of leaves and in the company of two birds, that dominates the image and captures the view-er’s gaze. Through exaggerated facial features, Al Shami uses the simplicity of line to convey an intensity of expression.
Also a trained photographer, Al Shami currently resides in the United Arab Emirates, where he continues to practice and exhibit.
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Homs, Syria, 1949Maryam, mixed media on board%& x '( cm, "#')
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Employing a distinct style of bright colours, form and com-position, the paintings of Seif Wanly blend the geometry of simplified shapes with Futurist and Cubist influences. Born in Alexandria into an aristocratic Egyptian family, Wanly was pri-vately tutored in art. In his portraits we find characters in self-reflective gestures detached from the pace of life. While some of his paintings capture live entertainment, theatre and musical performances such as travelling circuses and ballets, as seen in Russian Ballet (1958-60), Wanly’s primary concentration was to depict daily life. In Mother and Child (1957), he explores mater-nal intimacy, while Nocturne (1953) features a reflective scene of a solitary driver dozing on his a horse drawn taxi.
The artist established an art studio in Cairo in the 1940s with his brother Adham Wanly that was open to the public and any-one interested in the arts. In the late 1950s, Wanly travelled to Nubia to produce a series of paintings and drawings portray-ing life in Upper Egypt for a governmental project to document culture and conditions prior to the relocation that occurred to enable construction of the Aswan High Dam.
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Alexandria, Egypt, 1908-1979Nocturne, oil on panel58.5 x 71 cm, 1953
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Mother and child, oil on board72 x 75.2 cm, 1957
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The Russian Ballet, oil on board30 x 41 cm, 1967
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Nasha’at Al Zuaby realises the world spiritually and contem-plates it with extreme tranquillity, aspiring his conscience to recognise only the essence of matters, and then starts painting when this overall scene completely vanishes from his memory. The artist tries to re-shape the world through the impact of memory without any direct simulation. He achieves works that
are emotionally charged within an optical composition that doesn’t focus on tiny details, instead capturing his
interest in depicting the beauty of the scene’s spiri-tual and emotional aspects.
As part of his graduation project from Damascus’ Faculty of Fine Arts in 1964, Al Zuaby created the
piece featured here, The Bathers, which throws light on underground baths in his Syrian hometown Hama,
where soft light penetrates from the thick crystal domes and blends with the water fumes. The artist tackles the scene employing a solid academic approach and uses graceful lines, along with a unique palette of fresh colours, to embody his main objective: washing the spirits rather than the bodies.
After Damascus, Al Zuaby studied oil painting in Cairo, and helped establish the Fine Arts Association and Arab Artists Federation. His artworks have been featured in many museums and private art collections.
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Hama, Syria, 1939The Bathers, oil on canvas150.8 * 217 cm, 1964
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PreViouS PubliCationS
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Exhibition: Re: OrientDates: March 11 – November 22, 2013ISBN 978-1-907051-26-5Publisher: Art Advisory Associates Ltd.
Exhibition: AlienationDates: March 24 – December 22, 2012ISBN: 978-1-907051-18-0Publisher: Art Advisory Associates Ltd.
Exhibition: CaravanDates: October 14 2011 – February 22, 2012ISBN: N/A
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