Iraqi Modernism - Saleh Al-Jumaie

Saleh Al-Jumaie (Iraq, born 1939)

Untitled 

oil on canvas, framed

signed and dated "1968" in Arabic (centre), inscribed "Saleh Al-Jumaie, personal exhibition of 1969, from the collection of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra" in Arabic (verso), executed in 1968

58 x 58cm (22 13/16 x 22 13/16in).

"Saleh al Jumaie is very particular about his medium, which is usually a mixture of metal (mostly aluminium) and acrylic, and through it he continues an old concern with the darkness of the soul from the sorrows of tragic love to the horrors of genocide to which the Palestinians have been subjected for thirty years. The artist's roots, however, are in the archaeological sites of ancient Iraqi cultures: but his contemporary awareness feeds these roots and brings about in his work a haunting mixture of the beautiful and the agonized. His non figurative

almost monochromatic structures are very rarely completely abstract, just as his figurative compositions seem to aspire to the condition of the abstract; both are tense, time-laden, and haunting" - Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. More