Untitled

Growing up, Syrian painter Fateh Moudarres spent much of his time in the countryside. This early landscape is a rare example of Moudarres' work produced before the agricultural crisis of the 1960s forced him to relocate to Damascus. The city at that time was experiencing a period of unprecedented growth and fast becoming an increasingly cramped and hostile environment in which to live and work. Moudarres carefully preserved these memories of the countryside and the life of ordinary people even in later compositions, such as in monumental landscape he painted in 1970, which was sold in October 2009 at Christie's Dubai (price realised: $152,500). Although the latter is an idealized version of a Northern Syrian landscape, the palette is very similar to that used fifteen years earlier in the present lot. The soft, delicate brushstrokes depict a lyrical landscape with rich hues of light blues at the top, vibrant greens in the middle and deep browns and darker greens at the bottom of the composition, following the traditional order of colours as an illusionistic means to create an aerial perspective and give depth to the painting.