Unknown

An Elderly Couple

Charming painting of a mother and child. Very interesting early to mid 20th century oil on board. It is signed Muller. It could be a listed artist, but frankly there are too many Mu...

Dark times call for principled action or soul-destroying passive surrender to events beyond one’s control. On offer is a work by an anonymous artist of European urban landscape art t...

Benjamin Stahl: 1910-1987. Well listed illustrator with auction records over $10,000. I bought this fabulous illustration 15 years ago and it has been hanging on my wall ever since....

Bit of a mystery painting here. Nicely painted busy street English street scene, People and doubledecker buses moving along. It is signed, possibl...

An original mid century portrait of an artist and his muse or model inside his studio. This work is signed "Simon" although a definitive artist has not been determined.

Mid-century tempera painting on paper in warm orange tones of parent with child by French artist Clairet, 1956. Signed and dated lower right. Original artwork on paper displayed on ...

A painting by Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. “Untitled” is a contemporary figurative painting, oil on canvas by Canadian Conceptual artist Krisjanis Kaktins-Gorsline. The artwork is sig...

Since the 1940s, the Egyptian painter Hamed Abdalla is not only a visionary pioneer of modern art for the global south and Arab countries; he is also one of the first of his generation to envision painting as political art and activism. The current display focuses on a specific time of defeat and disillusion for a whole generation of Arab artists and intellectuals, in the aftermath of the “Six Days War” led by Israel and their allies (a war title which a lot of Arab activists consider propagandist, preferring to call it “The Defeat of 1967” or simply the “June 1967 War”). This persistent ideological wound became the symbol of failed dreams for the “Arab Nation” or Arab states alliances – including the short but emblematic Egyptian-Syrian achievement of the United Arab Republic. Another major failure, to which Abdalla will respond through the paintings on display here, is the Egyptian President Anwar Sadat program of “opening up” (Infitah) the Egyptian economy and give way to political compromise with the US and Israel – Abdalla assimilating this period to a vast state of Coma for all Arab people and territories. In a collective statement by a group of Egyptian artists exiled in Paris (including Abdalla), published in the Egyptian local journal Al-Dustur, on 5 December 1977, one can read: “This disaster is far greater than the defeat of June 1967. Rather, it approaches the scale of the disaster that took place in 1948 (…) To destroy the Arab people’s noble three decades-long struggle against imperialism and Zionism (…) Sadat is exploiting the stifling economic crisis that Egypt is currently facing (…) We must resist this betrayal of our nation or be crushed under the wheels of global imperialism for generations to come.” The works presented here reflect Abdalla’s transformation of the Hurrufiyyah aesthetics, to achieve his own way of “Arab Letterism”. It claims for a deeply experimental, non-decorative, politically committed and non-commercial use of the Arabic letter...