Gazbia Sirry

Biography

In the early 1950s Gazbia Sirry’s family moved to the wealthy district of Manial al-Roda, but she refused to go and rented a room in the old Cairo quarter of Helmeya, where she had grown up. She wanted to stay close to ordinary people of modest means. Her neighbours became her models. “Oum Ratiba” (1952), “Oum Antar” (1953) and “Both Wives” (1953) hung in her first exhibition, which opened in 1953 at the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo.

She was twenty-eight, and Paris and Rome were already behind her.

She was born on 11 October 1925 in Cairo, into an aristocratic family of Turkish origin. Her father, Hassan Sirry Nammy, died when she was four, and she and her two sisters were brought up by their mother, Esmat El-Daly, and their grandmother, in a villa in that same Helmeya, where most of the neighbours lived far more modestly. It was her paternal uncles who introduced her to art: they took her to the theatre and let her use their large library. On her mother’s advice she entered the Higher Institute of Art Education for Women Teachers (now the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University) and took her diploma in 1948. Government scholarships allowed her to go on studying: in Paris under Marcel Gromaire, in 1952 at the Egyptian Academy in Rome, and in 1954–1955 at the Slade School in London, where she studied painting and lithography. Back in Cairo she taught for about twenty years, and later became a professor at her old institute and at the American University in Cairo.

She began in the Modern Art Group. Its members supported Nasser’s revolution and wanted to create a genuinely Egyptian art, combining Western technique with local imagery. Sirry’s early paintings are peopled by strong women of every class, their figures outlined in heavy black and laid flat on the picture plane, as in ancient Egyptian wall paintings and Coptic icons. She kept her bright colour to the end. In 1952 she won the Prix de Rome; she showed at the Venice Biennale in 1952, 1956, 1958 and 1984, and in 1956 received an honorary prize there. Further prizes followed in Cairo and at the Alexandria Biennale, among them a second prize for lithography in 1959 and a first prize for painting in 1963.

At the end of the 1950s the tone of her work darkened. In 1959 she and her husband were imprisoned on charges of communist activity, and her disillusionment with Nasser’s government is usually seen as the main reason for the change. There were fewer and fewer figures in her pictures, the city gave way to wide views of the desert around Cairo, and the composition was now held together by the form of a pyramid, a triangle. In 1965 she received a fellowship from the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, an artists’ colony in the Santa Monica Mountains, and there encountered American Abstract Expressionism; in interviews she said that this period profoundly changed her work. Scholars also link her turn to abstraction with Egypt’s defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967. I would not choose between these explanations: by the end of the 1960s the figures had disappeared from her paintings altogether. In 1968 she won the fourth grand prize of the International Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Monaco, and in 1970 the State Prize and the Order of Sciences and Arts, First Class. In the early 1970s human figures returned, but in dark paintings that are read as her anxiety about the fate of women’s emancipation. After the war of 1973 bright colours and pyramids reappeared. From the 1970s until the end of her life she painted expressive “cityscapes”, webs of coloured lines that resemble a city plan.

In 1990 the Cairo Opera honoured her design for a tapestry in four parts. In 1993 she held a residency at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, and soon afterwards the museum opened an exhibition of Arab women artists, “Forces of Change”, with three of her paintings. In 2000 she received the State Merit Prize. Her works are in the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo, the Museum of Modern Art in Alexandria, the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and the women artists’ museum in Washington. She herself gave much of her work to museums, national landmarks and public institutions in Egypt, believing that an artist is obliged to help people understand what he or she depicts. Her last exhibition, “Art Is My Life”, took place in 2016 and covered work from the 1940s to 2010.

Gazbia Sirry died in Cairo on 10 November 2021.