Fateh Moudarres (Syrian, 1922-1999)

In many of his paintings, Fateh Moudarres portrayed a faceless crowd, the generalized figures representing a powerless mass stripped of identity. The figures are often shown without a mouth, reflecting their inability to express personal opinion, or with their eyes shut, oblivious to the events that surround them. In the mind of the artist, personal tragedies, such as the death of his two children at an early age, were linked to the political events and social tragedies in the Middle East

In such works there is a powerful sense of loss, just as Moudarres and his contemporaries felt the loss of the Golan Heights and the pain of the civil war in. Ideas such as the Loss of the Arab Dream, human cruelty, lack of justice and morality and the transformation of the human being into a monster, all come through strongly in his interviews.