Gazbia Sirry

Gazbia Sirry (جاذبية سري) (11 October 1925 – 10 November 2021 ) was an Egyptian painter.

Sirry was born to an aristocratic Turkish family in 1925, and was raised by both her mother and her grandmother.

She lost her father, Hassan Sirry Nammy, when she was four years old and her mother, Esmat El-Daly, was the one to take control of her education.

Her uncles on her father's side were the ones who contributed to her introduction to art by taking her to the theater and giving her the opportunity to become familiar with the expansive library.

Raised by two women, Sirry's maternal caregivers were tasked to bring up Sirry alone.

Her mother was left a widow after Sirrys’ father's death and with that, Sirry's female leadership figures took charge of her education and played a prominent role in the empowering feminist artwork that she would create later in life.

Sirry witnessed the struggle that her caretakers endured during her upbringing in Cairo.

Although her mother and grandmother had no attachment directly to a man, her uncles (on her paternal side) inspired her connection to art, theater, culture, and art history.

Sirry's first known educational milestone was motivated by her mother, who suggested Sirry attend the Higher Institute for Young Women in Cairo.

Her early paintings of the 1930s and 1940s are characterized by depictions of powerful female figures of all social and economic classes.

In these works, she emphasizes the role of diverse, powerful women in Egypt as well as their importance in defining a new Egyptian Republic.

During this era of her artistic practice, Sirry utilized strong black contours to highlight figures on a flat plane, a quality that defined her early paintings, along with her vibrant color scheme, which was a trend in her work until her passing.

After 5 years, in 1948, Sirry gained a diploma in Fine Arts which only enhanced her love for art making.

Her next journey was to Paris, France where she would learn from Marcel Gromaire - a famous painter and teacher whom she learned much from during her initial graduate studies.

Born in Cairo, Gazbia Sirry studied fine arts at the Higher Institute of Art Education for Women Teachers in 1950 (currently known as the Faculty of Art Education at Helwan University), where her dissertation traced Egypt's political history.

She later became a professor there, and also at the American University in Cairo.

She has had more than 50 personal exhibitions, official purchases by international museums, international prizes, scholarships and university chairs.

The paintings of Sirry capture the relationship between social reform, feminist consciousness and advocacy of women.

Because of their eclecticism and heterogeneity of modern Egypt, Sirry's paintings were widely celebrated.

Her early work was dominated by images of women in unmistakable poses of power, performing roles in the public and private spheres, and celebrating female unity.

In the late nineteen fifties, Sirry made stylistic and thematic changes to reflect the grim mood created by discontent with the crackdown on dissent and curtailment of political freedom across the country.

Into the 1950s and 1960s, Sirry began creating less figural and more abstract and expressionist paintings, due to a growing interest in non-representational forms as well as the inherent qualities of color and line.This transition has been largely attributed to her growing disillusionment with the Egyptian Government under the Nasser presidency after Sirry and her husband were imprisoned on allegations of Communist activity in 1959.

In this second era of Sirry’s practice, she continued to work with bold color; however her use of line softened and separated, representative of the personal and cultural conflicts within Sirry and Egypt at the time.

By 1952, she was furthering her studies at the Egyptian Academy in Rome and tunneled her efforts into Art Education.

Finally, she attended Slade College in London, England from 1954 - 1955, where she studied painting and lithography.

Feeling a pull back to her home, Sirry returned to Cairo where she taught for about twenty years.

Her education was a catapult into her professional career.

These educational markers in her life gave her insight into not only the art world, but the political and social issues she would later comment on in her art.

Her robust education gave her the stamina for her lengthy and successful career.

Gazbia Sirry's career as an artist can be loosely arranged into three distinct time periods.

It also became increasingly abstract: by the 1960s this shift was apparent.

While on fellowship at the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, California, 1965, she was introduced to the American style of abstract expressionism; in interviews Sirry credited this time in her life with “profound impact upon her art practice." Her shift towards abstraction has also been linked some scholars to political unrest and especially the Six-Day War of1967. The full abstraction was replaced in the early 1970s by the reappearance of human forms, but the dark paintings represent the fears of Sirry about the fortunes of women's emancipation. The dominant bright colors and pyramidal shapes of her paintings show the national pride and enthusiasm following the Ramadan/Yom Kippur War of 1973 in the later part of the 1970s.

Six years after her imprisonment, in 1965, Sirry earned a fellowship to join the Huntington Hartford Foundation in Pacific Palisades, California, an artists' colony in the Santa Monica Mountains.

There, she was introduced to the American style of Abstract Expressionism, which influenced the third developmental stage of her practice.

By 1967, the artist was no longer including figural representations in her work, instead focusing on furthering her discovery of abstract line and color.

From the 1970’s until her passing she fixated on expressionist “city scapes”.

These exercises in color and line evoke complex city grids.

Sirry’s entire career of work has been described as a “complex political project” as her pieces reflect and respond to her experiences living under the political unrest of Egypt.

In 2014, Shems Friedlander, professor of practice in the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication and director of The Photographic Gallery, described Sirry as, '‘a senior Egyptian artist who is recognised on an international level.

Her value to both the University and Egypt is both as an artist and a historian of Egypt’s culture for over 60 years.