Syrian Art Sizzles

Two years ago, when Khaled Samawi opened Ayyaam Gallery, the first major commercial gallery in Damascus dealing in contemporary Syrian art, he wasn't exactly welcomed with open arms by the city's artists and tastemakers. "They accused me of exporting Syrian culture," said Samwai a Swiss born financier and art collector of Syrian descent. Like many Syrian expatriates, Samawi returned to the motherland as it began opening up to the outside world, and he was thrilled to find an broad array of talented artists living in a bubble. Artists were unused to the kind of professional arrangements -- such as exclusive representation and an agent cuts -- that are standard in in the rest of the art wolrd. "There was still this romantic idea that artists have to be poor," said Samawi when I visited him on Saturday.

Syrian artists -- or at least some of them -- are poor no more. Middle Eastern art in general is the latest emerging scene in the contemporary art world, and Syria is moving to the center of it. In the past two years, prices for the artists that Samawi represents have risen 500 to 1,000 percent. Paintings for his top artist, Safwan Dahoul (pictured above), command as much as $200,000. Ayyam Gallery sells most of its works for around $10,000 to $20,000, has a branch in Dubai, is opening one in Beirut, and an exhibition -- "Damascus Calling" -- at an international art show in New York this October.

The Syrian art boom is is being fueled in part by the oil boom that is trickling down from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia to the rest of the region. But the collectors of Syrian art aren't mega-wealthy oil princes. "It's much easier for those guys to spend $10 million on a Picasso then it is to spend $100,000 on Syrian art," said Samawi. Instead, many collectors are part of a new class of wealthy Arabs (many of them expatriates living in the West or the Gulf) with the newfound confidence to have avant guarde tastes in art, and who are eager to promote such works from their own culture.

Syrian art is hard to categorize, like Syria itself. Ayyam gallery's artists are a cross section of this crossroad country's sectarian and ethnic mosaic -- Arab, Kurd, Armenian, Circassian, Christian, Muslim, Druze. Their work is also at a crossroads. Artists in Syria trained for the most part at government-run schools and academies, which, though formulaic and traditional, were relatively apolitical. (As long as artists steered clear of sensitive subjects, there was never quite a Syrian equivalent to the Socialist Realism orthodoxy enforced in the Soviet Union.) The decline of the centralized Syrian economy is giving even more freedom to create as they please.

But if several works on display at Ayyam were singular and beautiful, there is much about Syrian art in general al that's still derivative, as if artists are working their way through various borrowed styles -- cubist, sychomist, abstract expressionist -- to see which ones fit. Many a painting seems like a lesser version of something you've already seen before.

Still, that sense of experimentation is part of what makes it legit. "People like to say our culture is thousands of years old, but in reality, as a country we're just about 50 years old," he said. " We've had our trials and errors and ideologies come and go. But now we're starting to get it right."

-- Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus