Nazir Ismail (1948–2016, Damascus) was a self-taught Syrian artist known for his expressive and deeply emotional works. Art critic Joseph Tarrab wrote: “No artist is more loyal to his individuality, his feelings, his agony, his tears, and his joy like Nazir Ismail.” Ismail discovered art at an early age through the folk artist Abu Subhi Al Tinawi, whose studio was near his grandfather’s house.
In the 1960s, Ismail moved to Beirut and held his first exhibition. Following critical reviews, he began experimenting before developing his distinctive expressionist style. Initially focused on rural mud houses and their simplicity, his work later evolved into elongated figures and faces rendered through geometric and stylized forms. His expressive brushwork, earthy palette, and symbolic compositions conveyed themes of confusion, anxiety, and loss.
Ismail held more than 50 solo exhibitions across Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Dubai, Paris, Poitiers, Sharjah, Doha, Geneva, and Vienna. His work has been featured by the Barjeel Art Foundation, the Sharjah Biennale, the Royal Museum of Amman, and the Museum of Qatar, and has been sold through major auction houses including Christie's.
Among his distinctions are the 3rd Prize at the Exhibition for Young Artists in Damascus in 1971, the Graphic Prize in Berlin in 1980, and the 3rd Prize at the Sharjah Biennale in 1996. His works are held in private collections as well as museums and ministries in Damascus.
The figures of the Syrian painter Nazir Ismail, works on paper using various techniques, are significant in this regard. Difficult to qualify as faces, they have the canonical shape of an elongated Cycladic racket. The features barely emerge, simple clues, traces, vestiges that remain while slipping away. As if the process of leveling, leveling, flattening, erasure to which society subjects the individual left him with only a simple memory of humanity. And even then, he can hardly boast of his individuality. It only exists in multiple juxtaposed copies, packed like sardines in a space that leaves no room for maneuver. The slightest movement would disturb this columbarium arrangement.
There is no way out of immobility for this crowd of clones that rub shoulders head-on without one eye ever meeting another. Image of social, cultural, moral, political immobility. Sometimes a bird lands on a head as if to suggest the possibility of a release, of a flight out of this internalized prison. But it never spreads its wings. It too inhabits an invisible cage.
Everything contributes to this impression of an overpopulated world without thickness or perspective: the crumpled or coarsely grained paper, the graphic and chromatic minimalism, the unfolded, flattened and glued boxes on which are painted these ovoid adult abortions, men and women, terribly alone, solitary in common, waiting for a change that cannot come where nothing happens, where everything is blocked because no one takes the initiative. The group could do it, but it is paralyzed by its traditions, its obsessions, its fears. Hence the sadness that exudes from this canned humanity confronted with its own emptiness.
The art of Nazir Ismail, all abbreviations and elisions, makes his papers and polyptych notebooks a sort of entomological inventory of suffocation, despair, the absence of a future. In a sense, he continues his elder Fateh Moudarres but in a more advanced abstraction where the regional identity of the characters is completely abolished. But the typology of the representation remains clearly Arab.
Joseph Tarrab