Sculptures

In the schematic works of Toufic Abdul-Al, the image of women in the imagination of the artist expands into a decorated fantasy world crowded with meanings, which opens the door to multiple interpretations of the symbolism of the female in his drawings.
Women remained dominant in Abdul-Al’s works, even in a collection of wooden sculptures he did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, through which we can notice the influence of sculpture arts in ancient eastern civilizations on him. In most of these works, we can see women as a longitudinal architectural form and as an icon, which includes in its abstract symbolism the mosaic of identity deriving its existence from cultural, civil, national and popular heritage. In another work of his titled "Virgin and birth," the formation of a child appears in the body and at the bottom of the chest, as the artist borrowed the iconic representation of Virgin Mary to represent Palestinian women, who carry within them the gospel of life. He also employs the image of Ishtar, the goddess of love, fertility and war in ancient Eastern Arabic civilizations, by focusing on showing the organs of life and fertility, indicated by two prominent circles at the top of the body to represent the chest, and a triangle between circular and semi-circular configurations in the lower part. This sculpture involves a similarity comparison between history and the present, between the pain of Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ and the tragedy of the Palestinian woman, who while giving birth to children give birth to possible martyrs. Despite the geometrical and straight longitudinal shape, most of these sculptures have taken, they absorbed in their formations the circular shapes and curvatures that relate to women from sensitivity, beauty, fertility, tenderness and motherhood.