Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Amman

The core of Ismael Fattah's practice was the human condition. A recurrent theme in Fattah's creative painting journey was his fascination with human faces or masks. Within his painting compositions, the abstract faces are often shown with minimal features, lacking either an eye or a mouth but always portrayed with a certain strength. In this present lot, the placement of the two dark monochromatic toned faces are each emphasized within a square space to which they are slotted. On the left-hand corner of the composition a black heart outlined in mint green is displayed in front of a red background. The use of blood red can be seen to indicate both bloodshed and heartache; this could be referring to the half a million casualties during the gruesome war.

The present work was executed the year the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war ended. Here the dejected facial expressions of the two characters show his own personal reflection of the period of unrest, hopelessness, grief and hardship that the Iraqi people had undergone during the war. The composition reflects the political, social and economic instability that devastated both countries. His main objective was to express Iraqi themes in a manner related to the present time. Fattah's works were heavily influenced by Assyrian, Sumerian and Mesopotamian iconography. Like many of his period, he worked on reconciling his country's traditions with modern techniques, thus creating his own original style. The use of the two-dimensionality of painting releases a spiritual tension that Fattah could not effectively portray his ideas through three-dimensional compositions. Full of passion and simultaneous melancholy, Faces is a captivating and powerful example of the artist's ability to transcend various notions of media to instil a sense of pride, sadness and hope within one composition.

Celebrated for his outstanding sculptures, Ismail Fattah is as proficient a painter as a sculptor. Fattah has long been regarded as one of the pioneers of Iraqi modernism. Fattah was born in Iraq in 1934. He studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad under the mentorship of the renowned artist Jewad Selim and then went to Rome to pursue his studies in sculpture and ceramics at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Upon his return to Iraq in 1965, he became an active member within the art scene, becoming president of the Society of Iraqi Artists for Abstract Art as well as a founding member of the key group that instigated a new wave in modern Iraqi art; the Baghdad Modern Art Group. Fattah held a solo exhibition at Baghdad's National Museum of Modern Art of both sculptures and paintings that conveyed a concern for the experience of humankind in its wider global context and the relationship of the human body and the void, his new style contributed considerably in a new approach to art within the Baghdad scene. He later co-founded the New Vision Group alongside five other artists including Dia Al-Azzawi, uniting fellow artists ideologically and culturally as opposed to stylistically. Their focus was to create a new revolutionary and human-based art.