Lot 118: Gazbia Sirry (Egyptian, b. 1925)

Gazbia Sirry (Egyptian, b. 1925)
Burning City
signed 'Gazbia' and signed and dated in Arabic (lower right)
oil on canvas
29 1/8 x 38in. (74 x 98.3cm.)
Painted in 1967

The Egyptian artist Gazbia Sirry moved through several phases during the 1950s and 1960s, engaging with various different social and political themes in her figural compositions, including characters from Cairo's more rundown districts, folklore and Nubian subjects. After the 1967 Arab-Israeli war her focus changed entirely. For a period of three or four years she concentrated solely on groups of houses, of which she painted endless variations, collapsing, growing, over shadowing, burning, sometimes taking the shape of human or animals and fighting one another. Perhaps her most unusual and inventive group of works, it encompasses issues which include overcrowding caused by rampant urbanization and the resulting homogenization of the human experience. The earliest works, painted immediately after the 1967 war, express the horror of fire and destruction, a particular concern in such confined neighbourhoods. Burning City, painted in 1967, is dominated by a blackened form in the centre of the composition, which in its proportion and colouring recalls the colours of several Arab national flags.