Gazbia Sirry was a Cairo-born artist who came to prominence in the 1950s, having lived through the 1952 Free Officers Revolution in Egypt and the Socialist and Pan-Arabist ideologies ushered in by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In her work Portrait of a Nubian Family (1962), referring to the Nilo-Saharan ethnic group indigenous to parts of Sudan and Egypt, Sirry paints a mother surrounded by four children. The woman wears a brightly coloured, patterned dress, while her hair and body are adorned with elaborate items of jewellery. The family stands in front of what appears to be an arched doorway into a mud-brick house, common in Nubian villages. The outer walls of the house are adorned with geometric, floral, and animal motifs. The inclusion of the ornamental elements in the painting reflects Sirry’s interest in heritage, mythology, and symbolism drawn from folk culture. The work was painted during the construction of the Aswan High Dam, which resulted in the flooding of large swaths of Lower Nubia and over one hundred thousand people being resettled.
—Suheyla Takesh
