Youssef Abdelke
Youssef Abdelke was born in Qamishli in 1951 and graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Damascus University in 1976. He was a political prisoner for two years in the late 1970s before being forced to leave his homeland for exile. He moved to France and graduated from the Higher National School of Fine Arts, and later from the University of Paris VIII with a PhD in Fine Arts. He was able to return to Syria in 2005 to hold a major exhibition, and was then arrested again for five weeks in 2013.
His works carry the gestural and realistic styles, while adopting different techniques such as technical printing in which drilling is used on copper plates or zinc, pastel painting, or coal on paper. In a series of acts of silent nature that received widespread interest, he presented his themes, tied to ropes, in which skulls, knives, fish and other symbolic elements evoking war violence.