Ghaleb Khater - Artist in Search of Justice

DISCOVERING

GHALEB K H AT E R (1922 - 2009)

Opening Reception 5 March from 6 to 9 pm Exhibition 5 March - 25 March 2017

Joint Estate Management between:

DISCOVERING

GHALEB K H AT E R in search of a forgotten painter chasing justice

“ I have tried to depict the problems of our country, in the hope that finally for my country a solution would be found, and that people’s lives would therefore become more bearable and full of will. ”

By Fatenn Mostafa In 2017, we commemorate 2 consequential moments in Egyptian/Arab history: the 65th anniversary of the 23 July Revolution and the 50th anniversary of the 1967 War – commonly known as ‘el-Nakssa’ (the Setback). The psychological impact has not yet healed. As a testimony to history (and our failure to learn from it), we present Ghaleb Khater, a socially minded and forgotten artist who worked relentlessly to depict the ills of an Arab society burdened by conflicting ideologies and wars. Throughout his secluded career, Ghaleb Khater demonstrated a genuine engagement to save Egypt from its impending decline and social injustices and devoted his life to chronicle the problems of his country, which in fact, universal and timeless, reflect particularly well the present-day turmoil afflicting many countries in the Arab world.

Born in 1922 in Egypt – a protectorate of Britain and a monarchy ruled by King Fouad at the time, Ghaleb Khater cannot be categorized in any of the known generations despite being born at the same time as the third generation of artists such as Abdel Hady el Gazzar, Hamed Nada, Gazbia Sirry, and Hamed Owais.

Khater’s body of work consists of two stages. The first stage is highly influenced by Pharaonic art. Raised in Luxor during the first two decades of his life following his father’s professional commitment, Ghaleb Khater graduated from the Fine Arts School in Cairo in the 1950s and spent the next two decades exploring a formative period, where he combined classic realism using his academic studies under the prominent painter Hussein Bicar with his fascination for ancient Egyptian art.

The second and most significant stage began in the late 1960s and reveals a rupture in both aesthetics and concept, whose roots can be traced back to the 1967 war.

During the following three decades until Khater suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died at the age of 87 in 2009, Ghaleb Khater addressed the ordinary people of Egypt, rather than the intellectual or the cultural milieu. Though he did not have the chance to witness the 25 January 2011 Egyptian revolution, his pioneering second stage shows itself as a marker for political and social change and is instantly recognizable through the singular use of monochromatic palettes combining oil and charcoal to send the message of paucity – both material and ideological.

Western art narratives talk only about revolutionary art from the Arab world in the context of the Arab Spring in the 21st century, limiting them to a phase in time. They either do not know or chose to ignore the history of rage led by socially minded Arabs during the 20th century. From the 1930s until the 1950s, the Art and Liberty group, as an example, organized social movements and made controversial (surrealist) art with the purpose of liberating Egypt.

Starting from the late 1960s, Ghaleb Khater spent more than three decades pointing at the social injustices, oppression and inequalities, albeit in solace, to fight despotism and free Egypt.

Ghaleb Khater’s German wife (Adila) and their three children (Yasmine in Egypt, Hatem in Germany and Mona in the USA) inherited his works. His paintings have not been exhibited anywhere outside Egypt since a solo show at the Museum of Dresden in Hanover, Germany in 1980. And in his homeland, Khater left very little imprint on the art world, with the exception of two paintings at the Museum of Egyptian Modern Art in Cairo. And yet despite his forgotten legacy and deliberate isolation, his paintings attest to a farsightedness and despair that seems to be backed by an inborn sense of fighting injustice that persisted, contrary to other artists of his generation whose ‘revolutionary’ stage was short-lived and temporary. Khater slipped under a shroud of anonymity following that last stage, with his art packed away in the forgotten corners of his family’s attics.

‘Milad Gedid lel Dimokratiya’ (A new birth for democracy, painted around 2003-2004) is the last work produced by the late painter before he passed away in 2009. While ‘Milad Gedid lel Dimokratiya’ will remain an unfinished and unrealized work of art, it is an uncanning symbol of the unfinished and unrealized, though ongoing, Egyptian uprising of 25 January 2011 and tackles the numerous ills which caused the popular uprising and which the Egyptian society still suffers from. Khater’s incomplete painting may well be a silent nod to his buried yet extraordinary legacy and farsightedness. Khater repeatedly depicted his dismay at the failing society and foresaw the dramatic consequences that would arise from the oppressive tools used by the despotic government(s) to control and brainwash the people, either through religion, deficient education and addictions (football, shisha, drugs etc…). He called for and dreamt of a popular uprising ‘to make people’s lives more bearable’ (here and ‘in the whole world’) but advanced Parkinson’s disease would prevent him from completing the work.

‘Wounded Peace” (1960), ‘Loudspeaker (1970s), ‘Empty Promises’ (1972), ‘New Order’ (1972), ‘The March’ (1970s), ‘The People’ (1973), ‘The Stamp of a Nation’ (1979), ‘What Rules the World’ (1989), ‘Peace Only in Death’ (1991) and ‘Corrupters of Civilization’ point at a pioneering mind and show the great significance of an intellectual fighter who never gave up and genuinely sought to warn his compatriots of the dire consequences of remaining silent and accepting oppression, poverty and despotism.

At a time in the 1970s when artistic producers and audience receivers were recovering from the shocking defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s army against Israel, Khater realized that the military defeat was in fact symbolic of a far larger malaise and a hopeless future. At a time when artists remained painfully silent following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s institutionalization of culture or remained apolitical and supported the oppressive direction the government of Egypt was taking under the last two presidents prior to the January 2011 revolution, Khater produced in solace politically charged works where Egyptians are reduced to slavery and the rulers portrayed as controlling fanatics. He chronicled the different popular unrests (e.g. Bread Riot under Sadat), the rise of religious fanatism (under the three former presidents) and the continuous loss of hope in the face of oppression and rising poverty due to failed promises. Breaking from classic realism, Khater bravely transited into a territory very few Egyptian artists understood or sympathized with – that of conveying the collective sense of a shared failed fate driven by the perilous and unjust road taken by the late presidents Sadat and Mubarak. To do that, he moved away from colors to a monochromatic palette, depicting bodies, feet and skulls (the people) and animals such donkeys (a metaphor for stubborn leadership).

Depicting his socio-cultural and political convictions and historical interpretation of the failed governance, Khater moaned the demise of Egypt in his lonesome studio by taking the street; the very locus of shared collective pain and sufferance, to his studio.

Consequently, he was deliberately put aside, intentionally removed by the ironclad grip of Egypt’s centralized ministry of culture and by fellow artists who saw in his efforts to incite dialogue, provocations, and dismissed his works as too politically motivated and disregarded them in both content and form. In response and driven by a higher moral commitment, Khater pursued with themes of attestation

and witnessing. Responding to the call of history, he imagined emancipatory possibilities through rejection of the status quo and attempted the difficult task of stating what he saw, not as a witness to history, but as a committed Egyptian, Arab and African marginal. Detached from the cultural scene, he created singular aesthetics, using metaphors and symbols with minimalistic colors, to wake up the uninvited and absent viewer. No one knows for whom these works were primarily produced as Khater chose to seclude himself, rarely exhibiting. Whether he feared retribution or felt his message would fall on deaf ears remains a mystery but the necessity of self-expression, not the impulse for aesthetic creation, and his genuine morality seem to have encouraged his art.

To combat the institutionalization of forgetting, we seek to bring Ghaleb Khater’s voice of dissent and superior artistic deviance to light. The long process of rediscovering the ‘lost’ identity of such a late artist involved much trawling through original documents and archives. Such searches can at times yield unexpected results. While it was far beyond Khater’s capacity to formulate a political trajectory on his own, it is our moral duty to attest to his sincere and aesthetically charged revolt to resuscitate individual dignity, while avoiding falling prey to the current buzz of the revolution in the international art market. The labeling of contemporary artists as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘political’ as well as the current commodification of the notion of revolution will appear out of place because Khater’s work, four decades prior to Arab Spring, is explicitly ‘revolutionary’, timeless and universal.

BIO

1922 - 1945

Born and raised in Luxor

1945 - 1950

Studied at Fine Arts School, Cairo

1950 - 1970

Stage I: Neo-Pharaonic and Classic Realism Art

1970 - 2004

Stage II: Revolutionary Social Expressive Art

The Melody of the Poor / Lahn el Fakir Oil on wood 80 x 60 cm Dated 1958

What Rules the World?

Pencil on paper 96 x 139 cm Dated 1989

One’s Own Reading Oil on canvas 137 x 58 cm Dated 1967

La BoĂŽte de Sardines Oil charcoal on wood 171 x 137 cm

Waves, Violence and Children Oil charcoal on canvas 121 x 152 cm

Each Unfolding Brings New Treasures 176 x 136 cm Oil charcoal on canvas

Soccer - The Opium of the People Oil charcoal on canvas 137 x 143 cm

Motherhood Oil on wood 70 x 102 cm Late 1960s

Lonely at the CafĂŠ Oil on wood 61 x 81 cm Late 1960s

Peace Oil on canvas 57 x 137 cm

DISCOVERING

GHALEB K H AT E R Catalogue Published on the occasion of the show Discovering Ghaleb Khater 5 March - 25 March 2017 ArtTalks | Egypt

Graphic Concept & Realization Omar Mobarek Text Fatenn Mostafa Photographs Lisa Lounis

Coordinators Lisa Lounis Cherine Chafik

Printing Concorde Press

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