Standing Man, 2001

About the Artist

Established contemporary sculptor and painter, Zouhair Dabbagh was born in Aleppo in 1953. He pursued and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in 1977 from the Damascus University, Faculty of Fine Arts, Sculpture Department. He has participated in several exhibitions in his hometown, Beirut, Singapore, Istanbul, London, Paris, Geneva, Bulgaria, and Luxembourg since 1970. Dabbagh examines humans and animals in sculptures and renders them worth both naturalistic and unfinished qualities. The flesh is both decomposed and coming together, as though we are witnessing conception itself. Movement is paused, allowing the artist to skillfully study anatomy, emotion and soul. In his paintings, he studies, experiments and plays with colour. Colour becomes an active participant in his oeuvre, it is liberated and worked with as a free-standing element, producing effects of motion, dynamism and timelessness. Approaching paintings as he would sculptures, his canvases become markers of the body and of movement, layered with versatile texture and pigment. Dabbagh’s artworks are in the permanent collection of the Damascus Museum, as well as in private collections in Ankara, Dubai, Germany, KSA, Paris and Canada.