Category: MIDDLE EASTERN ART
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Hossein Kazemi’s Tar Player, with Footnotes, #46
A Tar is an Iranian long-necked string instrument, waisted lute family instrument, used by many cultures. This is in accordance with a practice common in Persian-speaking areas of distinguishing lutes on the basis of the number of strings originally employed. More on a TarA leading and pioneer Iranian Modern artist, Hossein Kazemi moved away from the…
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54 Works, A Century of Middle Eastern Art Part II, with footnotes
Abdul Qadir Al Rassam, (1882–1952), was born in Baghdad, Iraq. He was the first well-known painter in modern Iraq and the leader of realism school in Iraq. He studied military science and art at the Military College, Istanbul, Turkey, (then the capital of the Ottoman Empire) from 1904. He studied art and painting in the…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Ghasem Hajizadeh’s Yesterday-Today, with Footnotes, #45
Yesterday-Today is an enigmatic work that is representative of the artist’s signature style. One of the most sought after artists within Tehran’s high society since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hajizadeh is known for his compositions that bring together his memories of the past with his inspirations from the contemporary popular culture. Throughout his…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Ghazi Saudi, with Footnotes, #44
“The city of Ghazi al Saudi , today’s Baghdad, is the actual place implanted in a time that goes back some eight hundred years. Al Wasiti’s illustrations of Maqamat al Hariri have been a constant inspiration for him, not only in his smaller canvases and ceramics, but also in his large frescoes, where he employs…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Boutros al-Maari’s Antar and Abla, with Footnotes, #59
Antarah ibn Shaddad al-Absi (525–608), also known as Antar, was a pre-Islamic Arab knight and poet, famous for both his poetry and his adventurous life. Stories of his heroic exploits have been circulating for centuries and were eventually written down in the eighth century. Set in pagan Arabia known as the jahiliya, “before the time of the…
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01 Photograph, Middle East Artists, Tarek Al-Ghoussein’s Al-Wihdat Refugee Camp, with Footnotes, #35
Tarek Al-Ghoussein was born in Kuwait, his grandparents were Palestinian exiles who were unable to visit their native home. His father, Talat Al-Ghoussein, was a journalist, editor and a diplomat who served as the Kuwait ambassador to the United States in the 1960s. His family moved a lot during his childhood between Kuwait, United States, Morocco…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Jellal Ben Abdallah’s LA MUSICIENNE, with Footnotes, #61
Jellal Ben Abdallah, Tunisia (1921 – 2017) enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts de Tunis but stayed only three weeks. After winning the first prize in painting and receiving a scholarship, he moved to Paris for three months in 1949. In Paris, Ben Abdallah joined the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse district and also…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Nasser Ovissi’s Rakhsh and the Simorgh, with Footnotes, #60
Rakhsh (“luminous”) is the stallion of protagonist Rostam in the Persian national epic, Shahnameh of Ferdowsi. The color of Rakhsh is described as “rose leaves that have been scattered upon a saffron ground” and it is first noticed by Rostam amongst the herds of horses brought over from Zabulistan and Kabul. In this first encounter Rakhsh…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Fahrelnissa Zeid’s Metropolis, ith Footnotes, #42
Fahrelnissa Zeid (7 January 1901 – 5 September 1991) was a Turkish artist best known for her large-scale abstract paintings with kaleidoscopic patterns. Also using drawings, lithographs, and sculptures, her work blended elements of Islamic and Byzantine art with abstraction and other influences from the West. Zeid was one of the first women to go to…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Louai Kayyali’s UNTITLED (LADY), with Footnotes, #61
Louay Kayali, (1934–1978) was a Syrian modern artist. Kayali was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1934 and studied art in the Accademia di Belle Arti after having studied at the Al-Tajhiz School where his work was first exhibited in 1952. He met Syrian artist Wahbi Al-Hariri there and the two would share a friendship for the…
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02 Paintings, Middle East Artists, Ayman Baalbaki’s Anonymous, with Footnotes, #56
Ayman Baalbaki (born in 1975 in Adaisseh, Lebanon) is a Lebanese painter. He studied at the Lebanese University and at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. His large-scale expressionist portraits of fighters made him one of the most popular young Arab artists. Born the year the civil war started in Lebanon, Ayman…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Lorna Selim’s Baghdadiyat, with Footnotes, #57
Lorna Selim received a scholarship to study at the Slade School of Fine Arts, London, where she received a diploma in painting and design in 1948. The following year she received an Art Teachers’ Diploma (ATD) from the London University Institute of Education. From 1949–50 she taught art at the Tapton House Grammar School, Chesterfield, England.…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Akram Shukri, with Footnotes, #53
Akram Shukri is considered one of the most important artists in the development of the Iraqi modern art movement, and although primarily an architect he was the founding member of the Society of Artists and Art Lovers in 1941. This group included important Iraqi artists such as Jawad Selim, Hafiz Droubi and Faik Hassan. Numerous members…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Bashir Hammouda’s Still Life, with Footnotes, #55
Bashir Hammouda was born in 1948 in Tripoli, Libya. Hammouda graduated from the Accadenua di Belle Arti in Rome in 1974, having mastered painting, engraving and printing during his time in Italy. He became an assistant teacher at Tripoli’s Al-Fateh University. Hammouda subsequently went to study in Budapest, Hungary where he attained a PhD. Hamouda returned…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, OMAR EL-NAGDI’s Le Grand Marché, with Footnotes, #56
Painter, musician and director Omar El Nagdi was born in Cairo in 1931 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, after which he continued his art education in Russia and Italy, graduating from the Academy of Venice in 1965. In the 1960s, he initiated a series of works for which he is still renowned today –…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Ahmed Shibrain’s Letters from Khartoum, with Footnotes, #54
Ahmed Shibrain is an integral and leading figure of Modernism in Sudan. Shibrain was born in 1931 in Berber, Sudan. In the early 1950s, Shibrain studied at the Khartoum Technical Institute, and in 1957 he went onto studying at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Alongside his influential contemporaries Shibrain was one of…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Louay Kayali’s Cake Seller, with Footnotes, #53
“The Cake (Ka’ak) Seller” is a prime examples of Kayyali’s mature period in which key characters from Syrian daily life merge to the forefront. In this body of work, Kayyali highlights the protagonist’s struggle and vividly captures how political upheaval affected the Syrian population’s demeanor, shaping a culture and society that led to poverty and…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Samir Rafi’s The 1948 Nakba, with Footnotes, #52
The 1948 Palestinian exodus, also known as the Nakba, literally “disaster”, “catastrophe”, or “cataclysm”), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs — about half of prewar Palestine’s Arab population — fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1948 Palestine war. Between 400 and 600 Palestinian villages were sacked during the war, while urban…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Raghed Ayab’s The Monastery, with Footnotes, #51
Ragheb Ayad was born in 1892 into a Coptic family in Cairo. Ayad was one of the first students to enrol in the School of Fine Arts in Cairo. After graduating in 1911, Ayad worked as a drawing teacher at the Coptic Secondary School in Cairo and made several trips to France and Italy during those…
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01 Painting, Middle East Artists, Omar El Nagdi’s The Grand Market, with Footnotes, #50
Painter, musician and director Omar El Nagdi was born in Cairo in 1931 and studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, after which he continued his art education in Russia and Italy, graduating from the Academy of Venice in 1965. In the 1960s, he initiated a series of works for which he is still renowned today –…
Zaidan Gallery 