Fateh Moudarres

Biography

Fateh Moudarres himself called his painting “surrealist and figurative, with a strong abstract element”. The formula is clumsy but, it seems to me, honest: it makes no attempt to pick just one thing, and his works really do find room for religious imagery, the non-objective experiments of the 1960s and quite recognisable Syrian subjects.

He was born in 1922 in Aleppo. His father died early, the family had to leave its home in the north, and these losses later echoed more than once in his work. He received his secondary education at Aleppo College and at first taught himself to paint, beginning in a realist manner and gradually becoming drawn to Surrealism. His first solo exhibition took place in 1950 in Aleppo, at the Liwa club.

In 1954 Moudarres went to Italy and until 1960 studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. There he brought together the two tendencies he had started from and worked out a manner of his own. In 1959 he had an exhibition at the Galleria Cichi in Rome, in 1960 in Munich, in 1961 at the Gallery of Modern Art in Damascus, and in 1962 and 1963 at Gallery One in Beirut. At the São Paulo Biennial in 1963 he received an honorary medal. In the 1960s his painting went for a time into non-objectivity, and after 1967 politics entered it, which troubled him deeply at the time. Alongside this the religious theme remained, the Christian one included: his legacy includes “Madonna with Dove” and a whole cycle known as “The Icons of Moudarres”. He painted dervishes and the holy city of Jerusalem, a self-portrait with a blue fish, “Women at the Wedding”, “Wedding in the Qalamoun Mountains”, “The Magician and His Family”.

In 1969–1972 he studied again, this time at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and then returned to teach at Damascus University. He influenced many young Syrian artists. For many years his friend and mentor was the painter Wahbi al-Hariri, who was called “the last of the classicists”. Moudarres was dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts until 1993 and then stayed on there as a professor. He also wrote literary texts (some of them have been published) and made sculpture.

He exhibited on four continents. In 1977 he was shown at the Galerie Brigitte Schehadé in Paris, in 1978–1989 he exhibited several times at the French Cultural Centre in Damascus, in 1988 at the Goethe-Institut in Damascus, and in 1993 at the Aleph Gallery in Washington. In 1995–1996 the Institut du monde arabe in Paris held a retrospective of his work.

The largest private collection of his works belongs to the al-Hariri family, to Mokhless, the son of his mentor. Moudarres's pictures were collected by the German diplomat Rudolf Fechter and his wife Maria, and through Fechter, Walter Scheel, former foreign minister and president of the Federal Republic of Germany, came to know them and bought several works. His works are also in Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah and the Atassi Foundation.

Fateh Moudarres died in Damascus in June 1999.