Mahmoud Sabri

(Iraq, 1927-2012)

Public Bath

Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from the Artist's Estate, U.K

"In this rare nude, Mahmoud Sabri defies convention but only in appearance. Painted in a period when much of the Middle East was marked by cultural confidence and progressive thought, the work reflects a society unafraid of modernity. The figure is not an object of desire but a subject of her own certainty: assured, unashamed, and dignified. Far from a caricature of the male gaze, Sabri's nude rejects false modesty and affirms a moment in Middle Eastern art when femininity was portrayed as strength and self-possession."

From Figure to Atom: The Evolution of Mahmoud Sabri
Important Works from the Artist's Estate

"Together these works chart an extraordinary journey, from figure to atom and from the social to the cosmic, encapsulating the restless intellect and visionary scope of one of Iraq's most profound modern artists."

The following four works, coming directly from the estate of Mahmoud Sabri (Iraq, 1927–2012), together offer an exceptional overview of the full breadth of his artistic practice and intellectual evolution. Sabri stands among the most significant figures of modern Iraqi art, a founding member of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art alongside Faeq Hassan, Shakir Hassan Al-Said and Jawad Selim, whose mission was to forge a distinct modern Iraqi aesthetic rooted in local heritage yet responsive to international modernism.

Born in Baghdad in 1927, Sabri originally studied social sciences in London before turning fully to art. He trained at the Surikov Institute in Moscow between 1961 and 1963, where exposure to Soviet realism profoundly shaped his humanist outlook. Throughout his career he combined a passionate concern for social justice with a relentless pursuit of formal and conceptual innovation. From depictions of peasant life and labour to his later metaphysical experiments, Sabri's art bridged realism and abstraction, emotion and intellect, matter and spirit.

The first of the four works offered here is a quintessential example of modern Iraqi painting, echoing the aesthetics of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, the Pioneers and the Société Primitive, circles with which Sabri was closely associated. It captures the rhythms of rural life through a distinctly modern lens, recalling the work of his contemporary Faeq Hassan while celebrating the dignity and vitality of Iraq's countryside.

The second belongs to Sabri's Moscow period of the early 1960s, when he embraced the discipline of Soviet realist training to explore universal themes of family, motherhood and the human condition. These works reveal his compassion for ordinary people and his conviction that art should speak to collective experience.

The third, a nude composition, exposes another, lesser-known facet of Sabri's vision. Far from conforming to convention, it reflects the intellectual openness and cultural confidence of Baghdad's modernist milieu in the mid-twentieth century, a time when artists sought to reconcile human form, moral autonomy and artistic freedom within an Arab context.

The fourth marks Sabri's radical departure into the realm of abstraction and scientific inquiry: his pioneering theory of Quantum Realism. In this ambitious theoretical phase, he attempted to visualise the invisible, to express the energies and atomic structures underlying all existence. Through his own coded symbolism, Sabri fused art, physics and metaphysics in a quest to unite scientific truth with spiritual intuition

Together these works chart an extraordinary journey, from figure to atom and from the social to the cosmic, encapsulating the restless intellect and visionary scope of one of Iraq's most profound modern artists.