Suheyla Takesh

Lynn Gumpert

Taking Shape traces the emergence and development of abstraction in the Arab world through paintings and sculpture dating from the 1950s through the 1980s. Drawn from the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, this book features nearly ninety works by a diverse group of artists whose creative visions stretched beyond the boundaries of representation. Taking Shape explores how twentieth-century abstraction developed and played out across the Arab world. Including artists working in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates, this collection reveals the truly global reach of abstract art. This book sheds light on a number of abstract movements initiated by artists' collectives and individual practitioners, both in the region and among the Arab diaspora. Taking Shape also examines how these artists moved away from figuration and naturalistic depictions of reality toward investigations into the expressive capacities of line, color, and texture. Placing the featured artists and their works within larger cultural and global contexts, Taking Shape contributes to the burgeoning field of scholarship on art from the Middle Eastern and North African regions, establishing global art as a central component of modernity.

Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s

Taking Shape

Out of Iraq's most noteworthy modernist artists, Mahmoud Sabri was perhaps the most attuned to human suffering. Subjects of political martyrdom, social injustice, and the plight of the dispossessed permeate his work throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The period of Iraq's rapid modernization and chaotic political transition from a monarchical regime to a republic in 1958, followed by a Ba'ath military coup in 1963, left the artist with no shortage of tragic events to reflect upon and respond to in his work. His Communist beliefs and a sensitivity to social and economic inequality guided his artistic vision, presenting the world through a lens of human pain caused by political repression. This thesis argues that Sabri's practice in the 1950s and 1960s combined an abhorrence of discrimination with a constant desire to reach the people, especially the working-class, through his art. In light of this, his engagement with Iraqi heritage was not conceived around a formalist or a historicized line of inquiry, but around an exploration of the deep roots of a national identity through popular practices and vernacular customs. As an active contributor to modernist experiments in Baghdad's artistic milieu, Sabri drew from local traditions associated with the notion of martyrdom in the 1950s, which was bolstered by his turning to international iconographies of pain and oppression in the 1960s, to create realist images that condemned injustice exercised by the country's ruling elite. A paradoxical figure in many ways, Sabri combined in his work an interest in the local and the universal, the religious and the secular, in Iraq's past and its political present. Being both a man of the people and a member of the intelligentsia, an Iraqi and a long-time exile, an outspoken supporter of realism and a later convert to abstractionism, Sabri was no stranger to contradiction and internal conflict. What remained consistent in his early practice, however, was a political drive and a heightened sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed, which was layered with a belief that an answer to the predicaments of the disadvantaged could lie in Communism.

Suheyla Takesh

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