Iqbal Karesly

Iqbal Karesly was born in Damascus in 1925 and named Iqbal in the name of the Pakistani Indian poet Mohammad Iqbal, because her educated father Mohammad Naji was fond of poetry and the arts in general. Her children are the artist Walid Karesly and film director Mohammed karesly. Iqbal Naji karesly did not study the arts academically, educated herself through intensive artistic and literary readings, In Damascus, she was affiliated with the Jawahiri Institute in Egypt to study by correspondence between 1956 and 1958, monitoring the nature of her country, emphasized the specificity of that nature in a manner based on direct realism that often approached impressionism in bright colors and the desire to draw outside the studio using thick colors by knife or brush and affirmed the depiction of the lives of people around her wherever she moved. Iqbal was the first artist in Syria to hold a solo exhibition in 1964. It also participated in all group exhibitions held inside and outside Syria from 1954 to 1969. She died in Damascus after a disease caused by chronic lead poisoning in oil colors in 1969.