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Born in
Baghdad in 1953, Qassim Sabti became crippled as a
seven-month-old baby. Since he grew up in a neighborhood
with many athletes who were local heroes, he won
attention by distinguishing himself with his artistic
abilities. As a teenager, students would pay him a
falafel sandwich for a drawing, or for one of his poems
or love letters in beautiful Arabic calligraphy.
Upon graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad
in 1980, Sabti established a workshop for Arabic
calligraphy and painting. Beginning in 1985, he taught
at the Baghdad University of Technology, and in 1986
participated in the first Baghdad International
Biennial. In 1987, he returned to the Academy of Fine
Arts to teach painting.
In 1992, Sabti founded the Hewar Art Gallery in Baghdad,
which has since become an important and active oasis for
Iraqi artists (“Hewar” means dialogue). He faced many
obstacles in starting a gallery in the midst of the
embargo because the government stopped subsidizing any
art-related projects except portraits of Saddam Hussein.
And, because Sabti was not allowed to travel to sell his
art abroad, he had to reply upon the diplomats,
journalists, and employees of the United Nations and the
Red Cross who visited his gallery. |
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Steve Mumford, a New York-based artist who was embedded with the
coalition troops during several extended stays, describes Sabti
as “a charismatic, handsome man in his 50s, who holds court most
mornings in the gallery and the garden in the back, where there
is a charming café, surrounded by lush plants and sheltered from
the sun by a corrugated tin roof supported by antique columns.
It’s the greenest place I’ve seen in Iraq, and on this
particular October morning it’s buzzing with energy, with groups
of men and a few women talking animatedly.” Mumford, who has
received critical recognition for his watercolors documenting
scenes in Baghdad, says that “Artists of Qasim’s generation were
the students of the ‘Pioneers,’ the first generation of Iraqi
artists to bring modernism to Iraq, often inspired by their
studies not in Europe but in Turkey. Indeed, modernist
abstraction influenced by European and American schools is the
reigning painting style in Baghdad.”
Currently, Sabti serves as Vice-President of Iraqi Plastic
Artists Society, which has 1,780 members. He is also Secretary
of the Iraqi Cultural Council. His paintings are in private
collections throughout Europe, the Middle East, the United
States, Japan, and Korea.
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