Damascus-SANA
About forty paintings of different sizes, between medium and small, were included in the exhibition of artist Mustafa Rashid Najiba, in which the art schools and the stages in which he painted throughout his artistic career, in addition to the diversity of tools and colors.
The exhibition hosted by the People's Gallery of Fine Arts tells the story of Hama, the city of waterwheels, through paintings that monitor the febrile environment in the style of portraiture and through realistic and abstract schools in which the artist's environment appeared in one way or another.
The artist Najeba explained to SANA that he had a lot of participation in cultural centers and art galleries, pointing out that the artist does not decide to choose realism or abstraction or anything else because the work comes spontaneously and without planning and imposes itself on the artist to reflect his insides without his will.
Najeba explained that the portrait paintings are of personalities who have a popular influence in the community and come in a symbolic context of the environment or a specific situation, such as the worker, the farmer and the craftsman, pointing to the impact of the environment on him as an artist, so the city appeared in his works spontaneously because he had long lived and worked in the old Hama.
Najeba found that Syrian plastic art is in an advanced stage and heralds hope and good after the war years to rise and rise again.
Irfan Abu al-Shamat, head of the Union of Fine Artists, explained that the artist, Najeba, is one of the old artists whose style distinguished between realism, abstraction and expressionism. He conveyed through this exhibition the art of Hama, including its waterwheels, alleys, and various popular phenomena.
Abu Al-Shamat confirmed that the union seeks, according to the possibilities, to develop and raise the level of fine art in the branches, and is currently preparing for the event of the plastic art days in Syria, which will start on the 12th of next month and embrace artists from different governorates and generations.
The researcher Bakour Aroub saw that the artist Najeba is an educated artist who is aware of what he paints and says through his paintings that express a culture belonging to his environment, highlighting the mystical atmosphere that characterizes that region with clear touches that manifested through different periods of time, noting the paintings that dealt with migration, displacement, water wheels and the mosque with their meanings and colors, where each had The color of its cultural and emotional significance in harmony with the meanings and connotations.
The artist, Mustafa Al-Rashed Najeba, born in 1941, studied art at the Suhail Al-Ahdab Center for Fine Arts in Hama in 1965. He participated in many individual and group exhibitions inside and outside Syria. His works are held in the National Museum in Damascus and other public and private bodies.
Bilal Ahmad