Taha Sabie

Taha Sabie is an Iraqi artist residing in Marrakech. He left his hometown of Baghdad in the early 1970s never to return. Before his departure, Taha Sabie had nourished his gaze with a prodigious flood of signs, symbols and grandiose architectural buildings. Thus, during his childhood, a palette of elements were imprinted in his visual memory which continued to accompany him throughout his wanderings. To these elements and symbols were added artistic currents and schools that he could meet and observe in plastic arts exhibitions in Iraq, where the plastic movement was flourishing during the 1960s, which are considered an age of gold in Iraq in many areas. When he finally settled in the city of Marrakech in the 1970s, he fell in love with the city from his first visit to the point of making it his home. He arrived there at night - the bewitching night of Marrakech - and the exile felt irresistibly drawn as he walked towards Jamaâ Al Fna Square, illuminated with a thousand lights and in which marvelous sounds mingle. Taha continued his discovery of the city and its architecture, its buildings and its souks: Marrakech offered itself to him as an open art exhibition, and he found there what he had had to part with when leaving Baghdad - the palm groves, traditional architectures, crowds, refined ornamentation, palaces, riads and carpets. This symbolic wealth meant that Taha Sabie did not limit himself, in his paintings, to a determined and unique style. It is, on the contrary, animated by the desire to seize all styles; and if we want to attach an artistic style to it, it will have to be "the non-style", which is absolute freedom and the search for that unknown which it is trying to reach. Taha Sabie establishes visual interconnections with well-determined and well-known artistic schools, and his plastic passion leans towards Paul Klee, Picasso and Miro. All these directions merge to appear, in Taha Sabie's canvases, marked with the seal of her personality, both tense and imprinted with a calm similar to that which precedes the storm. This freedom towards which Taha Sabie leans has allowed him to diversify his media: he paints on old doors and engraves on wood. These elements meet a passion of Taha Sabie, who often repeats what Picasso says, knowing that he has never stopped painting to achieve children's drawing, that is to say, to the absolute innocence and sincerity of art. In accordance with this deep conviction, he devotes himself fully to his work for abandoned children, at Mado's in Tamansourt, as well as for Mongolian children in the Al-Malaïka center in Marrakech, to whom he learns drawing and with whom he draws.