FROM MODERN TO CONTEMPORARY I Highlights

ADHAM WANLY (1908-1959)
أدهم وانلي

Adham Wanly, like his brother Seif, was a prolific artist. His early works are influenced by his Italian teacher, Ottorino Bicchi, who was close to the Italian macchiaioli, a group influenced by the French impressionist movement and the École de Barbizon.

Bicchi introduced the Wanly brothers to outdoor painting and capturing the light, colors and shades of nature. Adham was later influenced by modern pictorial trends, such as cubism and fauvism.

Wanly among others painted landscapes and portrayed people of the numerous lands that he visited while traveling together with his brother Seif. He was also known to be a talented observer of the performance dynamics.

Together with his brother, he developed a passion for performance arts, such as circus, ballet and theater and captured the vibrant and dynamic movements of the performers on stage.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Written by Dr. ​Nadia Radwan​​

GAZBIA SIRRY (born 1925)
جاذبية سرّي

Her early paintings are characterized by depictions of strong, imposing female figures of all social classes. Through this variety, she emphasized that one singular, anonymous woman could not represent Egypt, but rather many different women defined the new Egyptian Republic. She painted these works in vibrant colours with strong black contours and a slight flattening of the picture plane, which became her signature style.

In 1967, figural representations vanished abruptly from her work (after a period of the scholarship in the United States, latter experience introducing her to the American style of abstract expressionism). Throughout the 1970s, Sirry painted abstract "cityscapes" – complex grids that evoke urban skylines simply but are primarily exercises in color and shape.

She remains one of the most significant artists of her generation and still responds to political shifts in Egypt, reacting to the January 25th Revolution with an exhibit of new work in the Spring of 2012.

As the 1950s and 1960s progressed, the prominent figures in her early work faded until 1967, when they disappeared altogether. Her canvases still depicted Egyptian figures, but in the late 1950s, her backgrounds became increasingly abstract as her interest in non-representational color and line grew.

This fading can perhaps be attributed to her increasing disillusionment with the Egyptian government.

In 1959, the government imprisoned her for several days, and her husband for three years due to their alleged Communist activity. Though she recalls her own experience with pride, her husband's imprisonment dealt a severe blow to her faith in the Nasser government.

Written by Alexandra Dika Seggerman

PAUL GUIRAGOSSIAN (1925 - 1993)
بول غيراغوسيان


He is one of the region's most celebrated artists. Born in Jerusalem to Armenian parents who had survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide, Guiragossian eventually settled in Beirut after being evacuated from Palestine by the British. Within less than a decade, Guiragossian would establish himself as a key figure in Lebanon's burgeoning modern art movement, in a prominent way preparing ground for the contemporary artists.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, artist's reputation continued to grow throughout Lebanon, the Arab world, and Europe.

In what would become an integral feature of his distinctive style, he uses long, vertical brushstrokes to depict the bodies of his figures as abstracted and elongated so that the imagery has echoes of Byzantine icons.

A true Modernist, Guiragossian began producing during the late sixties complete abstract paintings. Applying bright, bold colour in blocks to the canvas, he then left parts of the surface untouched, generating depth and movement through a creative embrace of negative space.

Written by Sarah Rogers

FARID BELKAHIA (1934 - 2014)
فريد بلكاهية

One of the foremost modernist artists in Morocco, Belkahia turned away from oil painting and easels in the early 1960s and began working primarily with large-scale hammered copper. While retaining multiple dimensions, the copper was meant to be hung on walls and was used to create bas-reliefs.

Belkahia was an active voice in the debates around post-colonial artistic modernism in Morocco. Using the cultural heritage of Morocco in his shapes, materials, and technique was a way of rooting international modernism within the local context.

Since the mid-1970s, Belkahia is best known for the work he has done with leather, which he treats using traditional techniques and stretches over shaped supports. He then paints the leather with naturally occurring dyes such as henna.

The process of the work on both copper and leather is for Belkahia an important aspect of the creation of his art, and his work typically highlights not just the organic shapes that make up the content of the work, but the texture and dimensionality of the materials themselves.

He has a consistent and carefully theorized taxonomy of symbols, shapes, and materials that resurface throughout his oeuvre. Belkahia's work typically uses sinuous, organic shapes that recall bodies or corporality.

MOHANNA DURRA (born 1938)
مهنا الدرة

�​Durra is considered to be a member of the first generation of Jordanian artists to receive formal training after being awarded government scholarships to study abroad.

Alongside his portraits is an equally fascinating body of abstract compositions. Dating to the early sixties, and representing some of the earliest examples in Jordan of abstract painting, Durra's compositions document a range of technique and method—from fragmented geometric color blocks to the more fluid drip paintings.

This body of work is united by a sustained exploration of light and dynamism.

Often directing movement diagonally across the canvas, he overlays color—at times, incorporating fabric material—to produce depth and texture. These planes of transparent color in turn generate a sense of motion. Whether working with a monochromatic palette or one combining bold, primary colors, Durra infuses his canvases with a penetrating light so that line and color engage in a dynamic dance across the canvas.

Written by Sarah Rogers

SLIMAN MANSOUR (born 1947)
سليمان منصور

Sliman Mansour is one of the most distinguished Palestinian artists working today. Throughout his forty-year career, Mansour has established himself as an internationally recognized artist dedicated to giving visual expression to Palestinian identity.

The artists participated in the intifada by boycotting art supplies imported from Israel. Working instead with natural materials such as coffee, henna, and clay, the artists tied the process of art making to both the land and the struggle.

This body of work documents an important moment in the history of Palestinian art.

Mansour has contributed extensively to the development of an infrastructure for the fine arts in the West Bank.

Although the artists adopted a nationalist agenda similar to other artists working in the social realist style, the distinction lies in an abstracted composition.

SUAD AL-ATTAR (born 1942)
سعاد العطار

Suad al-Attar's is one of Iraq's leading female artists. She's counted among the many modern and contemporary Iraqi artists who are committed to preserving the cultural traditions of their homeland.

Suad al-Attar became actively engaged in the Iraqi art scene in the 1960s. However, her artistic output reached maturity in the 1970s. During this time Iraqi art gained unprecedented international exposure.

Encouraged by her graphic sensitivity, much of her work is flat, linear, and emblematic. Pattern and ornamentation play a central role in her compositions.

Her work is featured on the Iraqi National Museum of Modern Art's Red List, meaning her work was looted from the museum in the wake of the US-led invasion.

Al-Attar's vision of Iraq's past and present is imbued with fantastical properties. Her oeuvre is composed of a kaleidoscope of surreal landscapes, mythical creatures, and epic characters. They gaze out at the viewer, inviting them to participate in an emotive and epic narrative as if the audience is the ultimate interpreter of the enigmatic scene.

Al-Attar's visual interpretations of poetry and folklore are deeply personal and provocative in a way that is distinct and still resonates with viewers. Her more recent works continue this emotively imaginative quality, yet at the same time also engage more directly with current national realities, exploring and expressing the trauma that Iraq has suffered since the 1990s.

Written by Tiffany Floyd

DIA AL-AZZAWI (born 1939)
ضياء العزاوي

Dia al-Azzawi was introduced to the arts by his older brother Majeed who was involved in the theater. Al-Azzawi possessed a natural inclination to draw, as a child often reproducing illustrations from magazines or sketching scenes of family life.

Because the Institute of Fine Arts where later he studied lacked a library, his exposure to art there was limited to figure drawing and a truncated version of the history of European art, reproduced in black and white photographs. Al-Azzawi sought out objects from the Iraq Museum he knew from his study of archaeology.

The beginning of the 1970's marked an important evolution in his art, as a result of being exposed to the work of modern sculptors in Paris, such as Brancusi. During the 1980's, abstract forms, pure volumes and the dynamic of movement characterize his sculptures, centered on the themes of sun and moon disks, as well as vertical ascension. In the 1990's, he worked on several outdoor large-scale sculptures, including The Ship, conceived as a metaphorical alternative to the museum space. Overall, his work embodies a sense of simple monumentality and timelessness.

Henein is also a talented painter who has never used oil painting on canvas but instead renews ancient techniques such as painting on papyrus sheets with natural pigments mixed with gum Arabic or the traditional technique of fresco on plaster.

His paintings, whether they represent figurative or abstract geometric subjects, are characterized by purity of form and warm tones, emphasized with a sculptural depth.

Written by Nadia Radwan​

SALIM AL-DABBAGH (born 1941)
سالم الدبّاغ

Al-Dabbagh's large-scale wooden panels and canvases depict essence rather than form. A first encounter with his artwork suggests the predominance of black and white, hence his use of mono-colors for which he is known. In fact, al-Dabbagh admits his fondness for black and white films over color ones.

However, after a deeper contemplation of his work, his quest for abstract expression becomes apparent. To tackle essence, al-Dabbagh resorts to a variety of aesthetic traits such as shades, shapes, thin lines, tones mainly black and white, and volume.

At times, a tiny beam of shapeless green and/or red occupies the most discrete space or inconspicuous corner in his large scale paintings, while a square, a cube or a triangle appears in others, or some black lines intrude into the white surface. However, the endless black and white nuanced layers invite confusion as well as interpretation.

In order to break from the monotonous harmony, his drawings allow a counter color, a technique which attempts to enhance a celebration of internal connections and intersections.

Al-Dabbagh has the ability to manipulate spaces through which he expresses numerous realities. He achieves this result through the fragmentation of the dense surface amid a series of levels of tonalities that embody the notion of endless "space."

Written by Samia Touati