This is a moving and thoughtful exploration of the work of celebrated Israeli artist Asim Abu Shaqra. "Someone had to move the sabbar, the cactus, to a flowerpot." This is how Anton Shammas opens his wonderful preface to this book, and this is the task that Asim Abu Shaqra has carried out over and over again in his paintings, in a kind of obsession arrested only by his untimely death at the age of twenty-eight. Throughout the entire course of his life, the artist was haunted by a sense of foreignness and not belonging, as manifested by his infatuation with the sabra, which were actually self-portraits tethered into Palestinian iconography. This publication offers new interpretations on Asim Abu Shaqra's paintings by three eminent art scholars: Tal Ben-Zvi, Kamal Boullata, and W.J.T. Mitchell, and includes an introduction by the editor Nira Itzhaki and a moving preface by Anton Shammas.
- ISBN10 8881588765
- ISBN13 9788881588763
- Publish Date 21 November 2013
- Publish Status Unknown
- Out of Print 10 September 2014
- Publish Country IT
- Imprint Edizioni Charta Srl
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 200
- Language English