Written by MYSA KAFIL-HUSSAIN

Born in 1934 in Basra, Iraq, Ismael Fattah Al Turk began his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1952. Prior to his graduation in 1958, when he earned degrees in both painting and sculpture, the young artist was a student of pioneering Iraqi modernist Jewad Selim. From 1961 to 1964, Fattah pursued further studies in Rome’s Accademia di Belle Arti, where he focused on sculpture, and then at the Accademia San Giacomo, also in Rome, where he studied ceramics. Upon his return to Iraq in the mid-1960s, he began his tenure at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he taught ceramics and sculpture until the 1990s.

Throughout his career, Ismael Fattah was an active participant in a number of artists’ groups and organizations, working to promote the art of Iraq and the Arab world both within the Middle East and globally. He became President of the Society of Iraqi Artists in 1971, overseeing the al-Mirbid Poetry Festival in Basra (1971) and the al-Wasiti Festival in Baghdad (1972) before the end of his term in 1978. Fattah was also a member of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art and became a founding member of the New Vision group in 1969. Created by Fattah and several fellow Iraqi artists, including Dia al-Azzawi and Rafa al-Nasiri, New Visions arose in response to the crushing defeat of Arab forces by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War. The shocking outcome of the conflict dealt a heavy blow to Arab society writ large, and to the dreams of pan-Arabism in particular. The artists of New Visions sought to combat this sense of devastation by portraying their people and their region in a new, revolutionary light, focusing on the promises of Pan-Arab cultural unity as they looked towards the future rather than dwelling on the past. Fattah, like many artists at the time, was a deeply politically engaged individual, and never shied away from addressing his beliefs in his artwork.

Much like his mentor, Jewad Selim, Fattah experimented with both painting and sculpture. Selim influenced him greatly, and Fattah paid tribute to the artist in multiple dedicated works after his death in 1963. 1989’s Homage to Jewad Selim, for example, honors his late teacher through allusion to Selim’s 1961 Freedom Monument. Painted in bright, high-contrast oils on cardstock, Fattah’s figures ­­–a human and a horse– seem almost jubilant in their movements as if rejoicing in the discovery of freedom. Though rendered in a style distinctly his own, Fattah’s work captures the essence of the Baghdad monument’s statuesque characters, which had come to represent Iraqi national identity. The 1989 painting was part of a larger project of the same name, which included the work of numerous Iraqi artists. Among the participants in the project was Fattah’s wife, Lisa, a German expatriate whose bold, expressive style had a significant influence on her husband’s work.

Fattah’s oeuvre centers mainly on his perceptions of the human condition, often teeming with unspoken emotion. His work often seems to remove the “outer layers” of his subjects in order to understand their inner cores; he rendered nudity and the human form in a minimalistic, pared-down style as if whittling away all unnecessary detail in search of his subject’s essence. Many of his paintings, as well as his sculptures, suggest a fascination with facial features, which he used as a way to play with abstraction, colors, and perspective, upending aesthetic and thematic expectations. In some paintings, a grid of faces wearing muted expressions that stand in sharp contrast with the work’s bright, striking color palette. In others,  various iterations of masks cover his subject’s face, isolating the figure from the world around it. A sculptural example of this tendency is seen in Homage to Picasso (1971), in which a tall figure stands proudly but holds a hefty block that obscures its face and identity. Evoking a range of forms echoed in sources as diverse as Mesopotamian sculpture and the oeuvre of Henry Moore, his artwork was not just an extension of local cultural heritage, but also bore the imprints of international artists and art movements.

Among the artist’s best-known works are several government-commissioned public sculptures in Baghdad. In 1972, Fattah created several monuments in honor of prominent figures of Iraqi heritage, including Abu Nuwas, Abu Nasr al-Farabi, and Yahya al-Wasiti. Ten years later, in 1982, he was responsible for public works celebrating ancient Arabic medicine and Iraq’s two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Among many other public sculptures, his most celebrated and recognizable is the Nasb al-Shaheed, or Martyrs’ Monument, which was commissioned by Saddam Hussein in 1983 to honor Iraqi soldiers who died in the Iran-Iraq War. Though the Iraqi leader had intended for the monument to serve as propaganda for him and his army, it is now considered a unifying commemorative monument to all Iraqi martyrs. Minimalist in its simple, domed design and striking in its bright blue color, it has become synonymous with modern Iraqi visual culture.

“In the beginning I had several attempts such as an idea of having the martyr bursting from the centre. But I did not like it – it was too theatrical. Then, the idea of life versus death began to form. The two pieces moving together towards martyrdom and fertility and the life stream. I moved the pieces until I got the interplay I wanted.”
Ismail Fattah on the origins of the Nasb al-Shaheed, Gilgamesh Magazine, 1987

Living in the aftermath of the Gulf War, Fattah struggled under the weight of his country’s economic sanctions, and his work began to reflect Iraq’s bleak political and humanitarian state. He replaced his vivid colors with dark and muted tones in many artworks, portraying faces that were devoid of discernible emotion, if not obscured completely. In the late 1990s, Fattah relocated to Qatar, where Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani started an initiative to support artists after recent wars and instability. In Doha, Fattah began working on a large public sculpture in 2001, entitled The Guardian of the Fertile Crescent, to be placed outside Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. However, he was soon diagnosed with cancer, and after traveling to Abu Dhabi to receive treatment, his family chartered a plane so that he could live out his last days in Iraq. Within hours of arriving in Baghdad in 2004, Fattah passed away. To this day, amongst artists and art lovers alike, he remains one of the Arab world’s most significant and revered artists. His legacy also lives on in his final sculpture; The Guardian of the Fertile Crescent was completed in 2010, and now stands outside Doha’s premier museum of contemporary art.

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