Lot 64: Al Meaydiyah (The Female Labourer)

Ali Talib (Iraqi, b. 1944) Al Meaydiyah (The Female Labourer) signed and dated in Arabic (lower right); titled, dated and dedicated in Arabic (on the reverse) oil on canvas 27½ x 27½in. (70 x 70cm.) Painted in 1976

70 x 70cm.

A gift from the artist to the present owner.

Al Meaydiyah or The Female Labourer was painted in 1976, a year that marked the artist's radical departure from his dominant artistic style to a new phase of his aesthetic language. About this shift into a new artistic phase, the renowned art critic May Muzaffar commented in 1976 'his painting[s] maintained [their] basic character as work[s] motivated from an inner world reflecting the intensity of his mind as well as emotions' (M. Muzaffar quoted in "A Turmoil Under a Quiet Surface" in Gilgamesh Magazine, no. 3, 1988). Talib's works from 1976 onwards revealed a more organised thought process as well as artistic content, like in Al Meaydiyah where the artist has portrayed an intriguing profile of a woman. The present lot shares great similarity with works that the Iraqi artist had presented in an exhibition during the year of its production, in which 'faces, masked or deformed, were reflected in an atmosphere of stage design where the light allowed the spectator to get involved with the intriguing characters [on canvas] that emerged from the darkness of their surroundings' (idem). Al Meaydiyah too portrays a caricaturised masked face, the profile of a female labourer from southern Iraq, with minimal detail in the background so as to equip the work with an innate spotlight and draw the viewer's gaze immediately to the grotesque yet striking woman. From here on, this style remained one of Talib's foremost approaches to his art for the rest of his oeuvre and 'although his paintings vary in their degree of intensity, they always hold back their own mystery and it is in this ambiguity that the charm of his art lays'. (idem).