Asim Abu Shakra

Tel Aviv, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Asim Abu-Shakra, 1994, p. 6, no. 27, illustrated in exhibition catalogue

Asim Abu Shakra was born in Um el Fahm in 1961. In 1982 he moved to Tel Aviv and studied in Kalisher, the Tel Aviv School of Art, where he also taught between 1987-1988. Following a severe illness, Abu Shakra died in 1990 at the age of 28. The following year, a memorial exhibition of his works was held at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem and in 1994, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted a solo exhibition of his work.

Opposed to Abu-Shakra's known series of potted cactus plants set in interiors, the Sunflower is portrayed as a lone wild plant rising high against all odds in its natural setting. Flowerless, its stem takes up almost all of the pictorial space, confined by the artist on two joined vertical sheets of paper, its struggle, emphasized for the viewer.

In this important work one can see the influence of Abu-Shakra's encounter with the work of Giacometti. "He was profoundly impressed by Giacometti's manner of drawing and the way in which he designed the three-dimensional space of his objects... Abu Shakra's great affinity for Giacometti derived not only from the esteem in which he held his pictorial style, but also from the spirit of humanism and skepticism characteristic of his paintings, in which he found the human dialectic so close to his heart: human solidarity, on the one hand, and basic solitude, on the other." (Tali Tamir, "The Shadow of Foreignness: On the Paintings of Asim Abu-Shakra" in Asim Abu-Shakra (exhibition catalogue), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, 1994, p. 86).
Three Israeli artists also greatly influenced Abu Shakra's work: Uri Stetner, Moshe Kupferman and David Reeb.  "Reeb had a crucial influence on the work of Abu-Shakra, who absorbed from him the tendency for flatness, the decisive linearity, and the use of ornamental patterns and black contours. The encounter with Reeb's work caused Abu-Shakra's later paintings (especially those from the last two years of his life) to shift from the early lyrical sensitivity towards a more rigid, direct language. This language emerged out of the attempts in Israeli art to formulate more precise plastic means for a political statement that could not be made through lyrical painting...  Abu-Shakra's plant perforce radiates the poetics of symbolic solitude and an assumption of the possibility of beauty." (Ibid).