Mahmoud Sabri

(Iraq, 1927-2012)

Mother and Child

Footnotes

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

Published:
Dr Hamdi Touqmachi, Mahmoud Sabri: His Life, Art and Thought, p.51

"This is a rare work from Mahmoud Sabri's Moscow period, painted while he was studying at the Surikov Institute between 1961 and 1963. Although most of Sabri's oeuvre is overtly political, here he turns to a tender and intimate subject: motherhood.

The stylistic influence of Russian art is unmistakable, with the composition echoing Eastern Orthodox iconography — the mother and child standing in for the Virgin and Christ. In doing so, Sabri elevates motherhood and underscores its sanctity, and, as with much of his work, there may be subtle political undertones, a discreet assertion of the enduring power of maternal care against the backdrop of conflict."

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.