Nizar Sabour

Nizar Sabour (b. 1958, Latakia, Syria) studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus under Syrian modernist masters including Fateh Moudarres and Nazir Nabaa, graduating in 1981. He went on to earn a PhD in Sciences of Art from the Stroganov Moscow State Academy in 1990, where exposure to both Socialist Realism and major modernist retrospectives , chagall, Bacon, Malevich, sharpened his voice without pulling him away from his own cultural roots. He served as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Damascus University, from 1991 until 2023.

His work moves between two persistent concerns: the Oriental city as living memory, and spirituality drawn from the icons and manuscripts of his Syrian Christian environment. He works with raw, tactile materials, local soils, ash, olive mill pomace, giving his paintings a physical weight that mirrors their emotional one.

From the 1980s onward, he developed major series responding to the region’s upheavals: the city paintings rooted in Damascus and Gilgamesh, the Contemporary Icon and Palmyra Icons series, and after 2011, his most internationally recognized work, the wooden artist books, the Qalamoun series, and the Maaloula paintings, documenting Syria’s destruction through ash, gold leaf, and burned materials embedded directly into the surface.

His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Dalloul Art Foundation, Canada Foundation, Atassi Foundation, the National Museum of Syria, the Royal Jordanian Museum, Sharjah Museum, Bahrain Museum, the Museum of Syrian Art in Bremen, Germany, the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, and the Fine Arts Museums in the Russian cities of Ryazan and Izhevsk. His works are also held in private collections across the Middle East, Russia, Europe, and the USA.