GAZBIA SIRRY (EGYPTIAN, B. 1925)

Many of Sirry's paintings from the 1950s and 1960s carried important social messages. This painting addresses the poverty and famine in Africa, the emaciated figure barely clinging to the branch.
Gazbia Sirry was a member of the Group of Modern Art, a movement which sought to express an Egyptian identity, formed at the time of the Egyptian revolution in 1952. In the words of a fellow member, the artist Hamed Oweis (b. 1919), they "rejected 'surrealism', because it was essentially a rebellion, or an art which did not aim at the consciousness of the people at large" (L. Karnouk, Modern Egyptian Art 1910-2003, Cairo, 1999, p. 80).