Written by Fadia Antar

Born in the city of Latakia, Syria, in 1958, Nizar Sabour graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Painting and Drawing, in Damascus, in 1981. He was taught under prominent modernist Syrian artists such as Fateh Moudares, Nazir Nabaa, Elias Zayat, and Khaled Almaz. The contribution of these masters of Syrian modernism was essential for the young student to build his artistic identity. Indeed, Fateh Moudarres promoted the freedom to think while Nazir Nabaa passed on to him the love of art and sincerity towards his work. These influences shaped Sabour’s personality and position toward art. With such influences, the artist flew to Moscow to pursue his studies. He earned a doctorate of Philosophy in Sciences of Art from the Stroganov Moscow State Academy of Arts and Industry, Russia, in 1990. Back in Syria, Sabour was appointed Professor at the Department of Drawing and Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Damascus from 1991 to the present day. While at his position, he headed several art departments at the University of Damascus and at other institutions. He also holds the position of Professor at the Faculty of Media and Applied Arts at Qalamoun University from 2017 and until today.

Details of Damascus influenced Sabour's first painterly performances when he moved there to pursue his art studies. In essence, the old city alleys, its wooden doors, and architectural façades were departing points for Sabour to create a body of work about Damascus where he represented the city in a suggestive, rather than a realistic approach. To explore this theme the artist was influenced by the Iraqi art exhibitions that took place in Syria at that time. He was mostly drawn by the art of Jewad Selim and Mohamad Muhraddine and the writings of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who all advocated for the inspiration from the cultural heritage of the region and the translation of ancient Middle Eastern imagery into modern art forms. In this body of work, Sabour started his lifetime experimentation with local soils, ashes, and olive mill pomace (the black remains of the olive press), rendering the city details in earthy dark colors. By using rough and raw materials, he introduced a tactile experience to his artwork.

Following a similar intention to revive the local cultural heritage, Sabour was infatuated with the Epic of Gilgamesh. He discovered it through the chants of a local artist, Abed Azrié, and immersed himself into the epic’s plots and schemes, listening to the performing voice and the simple acoustics of a solo musical instrument. The songs of Azrié reflected the oriental minimalism appreciated by Sabour, which led him to study the Assyrian art, the origin of the story, and absorb its tendencies to formal abstraction and lack of literal representation. The outcome was a series of paintings (his graduation project in the early 80s), that recreated music and written texts into a pictorial language without the intention to illustrate the scenes or events; instead, he revealed the humanity in the hero figure, using colors, signs, and symbols. In his depiction of the epic characters, the artist aimed to convey their internal conflicts and spirituality more than to represent accurately their details. Better than a precise portrayal of life, in the series of Gilgamesh, Sabour showed a positive link to life. His red hues, shimmering glitters, and the blue of the skies and seas of Gilgamesh remained the artist’s references to date.

At the end of 1985, Sabour arrived in Moscow with a sharp artistic personality at its early development, to witness its influential school of Socialist Realism (the predominant form of approved art in former Soviet Union). The powerful subjects and the high level of drawing and painting skills he perceived, overwhelmed the young artist. For years, he was trained to create realistic portraits and landscapes, at the same time, he had the opportunity to attend several modernist's exhibitions that took place in Moscow in the 90s, like the retrospectives of Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Jean Arp, Kazimir Malevich, and many others. The Moscow experience was a formative one: while giving him the accurate skills it guided him to question the Socialist Realism and distance himself of any "isms" idolatry, validating the self-expression of the artist and his connection to his own culture and uniqueness.

After the Moscow experience and as a continuation to his early Damascus project, the artist visited regularly the subject matter of the Oriental Cities, from 1973 until 2003. Influenced by several Middle Eastern cities, his city took the shape of a generalized eastern one, with no definite geographic references, but only anchored in history, personal and collective memory. To extract his city from the nostalgia and place it in a timeless zone, Sabour did not practice any illusion of reality; he implemented a gradual perspective starting from the bottom up, creating a space in between flatness and controlled depth. The flatness in his works takes the eyes of the viewer to a unified surface, the one dimension, in the way of religious manuscripts and icons: Sabour sanctified his city.

Always interacting with the surrounding social and political events, Sabour addressed the Palestinian revolution and the disaster of a train burning in Egypt in his series Life in ashes (2001-2003). His media was a means to convey the harshness of the human condition: he used ashes and black olive mill pomace and performed with the roughness of the materials to depict simplified and congregated figures, people who seem to have lost their forms and aspects through tough experiences. Also, the United States’ invasion of Iraq was his motivation to produce the series Antar of our times (2003-2005), where he represented a comparison between the hero figure of yesterday, Antar, with men currently in power. Away from any heroic attributives, men of today represent the fallen hero figure. Sandouk al Forjah- Antar (Memory and present), 2003, part of Dalloul Art Foundation's collection is an example of this series.

Influenced by the artist's Eastern and Christian environment, Sabour's works are a fusion between the styles of the miniatures and of the icons. The artist acquired his first visual lessons through the icons found in the homes and churches of the old city of Latakia. The icon's structures dominated his entire work, and he dedicated to the subject a series called Contemporary Icon, produced from the year 1988 to 2009, and later the series Palmyra Icons, from 2009 to 2010. Here, and in his entire oeuvre, Sabour tried, as in the art of miniatures, to create a continuous visual movement on the surface of his painting by distributing single colored spots of colors: a yellow, red or blue dot that wanders on the painting, capturing the attention of the viewer and reducing any perception of depth. Sabour used for his Icon, his thick media of dust and soils, on hard wooden boxes, sometimes adding a shelf with a chandelier on its bottom, and opened in those boxes windows which showed the features of the saints. By creating rigid carcasses, borderline between the inner sacred universe of the saints and the outside world, Sabour implies that the work of art is, beyond what is happening on its surface, a manifestation of spirituality.

Amid the beginning of the current unfortunate events happening in Syria, in 2011, Sabour stopped his art production for a while, to restart with a series Epitaphs, which were death announcements for every Syrian sect, stating that conflict is a way to kill everyone. In the absence of basic life utilities (water, electricity) and hard daily conditions, it was impossible to produce large works. Sabour created a series of thirty artist wooden books between 2012 and 2013. Every book was made out of seven wooden pages sometimes pierced with bullets, and where the artist inscribed his poignant statements: "In Damascus there are more mortar shells than sparrows"; "We raise our children so they can flee out of this country." An example of the artist wooden books his work Feelings prior to the American strike, 2013, part of DAF's collection.

From 2014, and after the assault over the district of Qalamoun in Syria with its religious and historical cities, Nizar Sabour created the series Qalamoun. Maaloula (2016-2017) from the Qalamoun series is part of the collection of DAF. It portrays the city of Maaloula, a town northeast of Damascus, built into the rugged mountainside and where the old Aramaic language (the language of Christ) is still spoken to date. This city witnessed its churches and old icons burned by the fighting militias. Sabour used his ashes and olive mill pomace mix, creating a thick, solid, and dark presence to the mountains surrounding the city. The icons and religious figures, which constitute the local cultural heritage, are gathered on the frame to form a protective shield around the city.

Nizar Sabour is a prolific artist who transferred the spiritual details of his homeland into painterly projects, and, at the same time, retracted this spirituality exclusive to the places of worship and made it accessible to the viewers. His art records all the region's sufferings, but is always rendered with hints, rather than direct representations. He continues to the present day to teach and work between Latakia and Damascus, expecting better days for Syria to come: “I live in a state of waiting, waiting for the end, the end of all this madness, so that we can return to life"[1].

[1] Quote by Nizar Sabour at: Kasim, Ali. “نزار صابور فنان سوري يبحث عن الحياة ي الموت: .” صحيفة العرب, February 7, 2020. https://alarab.co.uk/نزار-صابور-فنان-سوري-يبحث-عن-الحياة-في-الموت.

Sources

Kasim, Ali. “نزار صابور فنان سوري يبحث عن الحياة ي الموت: .” صحيفة العرب, February 7, 2020. https://alarab.co.uk/نزار-صابور-فنان-سوري-يبحث-عن-الحياة-في-الموت.

El Cheikh, Zeina. “Nizar Sabour: Places and Memories, War and Love.” Visual History, October 5, 2019. https://visual-history.de/2019/10/05/nizar-sabour/.

Souwayleh, Khalil. “نزار صابور: ‘ست سنوات’ على الفجيعة السورية.” الأخبار, December 22, 2016. https://al-akhbar.com/Last_Page/234403.

Masri, Monther. “نزار صابور في القلمون وجوه وأيقونات.” alaraby. العربي الجديد, December 29, 2015. https://www.alaraby.co.uk/supplementculture/2015/12/28/نزار-صابور-في-القلمون-وجوه-وأيقونات.

Qāsim al-Sayyid Saʻd. Nizār Ṣābūr, Al-insān - Al-lawḥah. Dimashq: Wizārat al-Thaqāfah, al-Hayʼah al-ʻĀmmah al-Sūrīyah lil-Kitāb, 2015.

This biography was made possible through a two hours interview, by the writer, with Nizar Sabour.