(1927 - 2012)
Born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1927, Sabri studied social sciences in the UK, receiving his diploma in 1949. He studied art privately and became an active member of the Pioneers Group, participating in their exhibitions until 1962. He also participated in many of the Iraqi contemporary art exhibitions organized abroad. Sabri’s early works demonstrate his interest in humanitarianism and his belief that an artist’s role is to engage with social issues and humankind. He left Baghdad in the early 1960s, settling in Prague. From the mid-1960s, he became increasingly interested in the relationship between art and science, focusing on greater abstraction and the colour, form and structure of the art work. His experiments with colour and abstraction led to his theory of Quantum Realism, published in Prague in 1971 as a manifesto—the same year he held a solo exhibition there. His work is held in collections including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.