Personal Info
- Country of residence: Portugal
Information
Fathi Ismail Abu Ghubn was born in the depopulated village of Hirbiya in the occupied Gaza Strip on November 12, 1946. He is married and has nine children. He completed his primary education at UNRWA schools in the Jabalia refugee camp and attended Al-Azhar Institute in Gaza for two years. He worked as a newspaper and magazine vendor, then as a plasterer and painter, before becoming a teacher at Al-Nasr Model Islamic School in Gaza City. He was later appointed as an advisor to the Ministry of Culture.
He learned art by practice from a young age in the Jabalia camp, and mastered clay sculpting. It is said that he started by drawing on rusty “trays,” coloring them and then returning them to their owners. He also drew the United Nations Emergency Force during the occupation of the Gaza Strip in 1956, and his drawing impressed the teaching staff at his school.
He began his artistic career in 1969, painting several works including "The Tragedy of Palestine," "Identity," and "The Battle of Ain Jalut." His paintings revolved around identity, resistance, and liberation from occupation, expressing longing for Palestine. They also depicted life in the Palestinian village, Palestinian refugees, and camp life.
He held ten solo exhibitions, including one at the Mahmoud Darwish Museum in Ramallah, which he attended himself. He co-founded the Association of Visual Artists in the Gaza Strip and the Palestinian Association of Visual Artists in the West Bank and Gaza, and was a cultural activist. He illustrated the covers of many books. In the 1970s and 80s, he became one of the most important artists in the Gaza Strip, and the artist Suleiman Mansour described him as "the Van Gogh of Gaza."
Ghobn received several awards, including the Hiroshima Medal, the World Federation of Associations Medal in Tokyo, and was named “Artist of Palestine” for the year 1993. He also received the Medal of Culture, Science and Arts in 2015, and the Palestinian Press House Appreciation Award for the year 2023, while he was a member of the Palestine Awards Committee for Literature, Arts and Humanities for the year 2020.
Ghabban suffered greatly under the occupation, being summoned for interrogation by its intelligence services several times because of his paintings. These summonses began in 1978. He was also arrested several times, and in one instance, he was sentenced to six months in Israeli prisons in 1984 for his famous painting "Identity," which he painted in 1980. The painting was published by Ibn Rushd Publications in Jerusalem as a postcard and distributed in Palestine and abroad. The occupation authorities prevented him from traveling for several years, confiscated his artwork, and prevented him from leaving the Gaza Strip for medical treatment since the outbreak of the genocidal war on Gaza in October 2023. Despite suffering from severe chest and lung problems and needing to continue his treatment due to the shortage of medicine and oxygen in Gaza, his health deteriorated further after inhaling smoke and phosphorus gas during his displacement from the north to the south of the Strip. The occupation forces bombed and destroyed his home and his collection of paintings, which he had produced over decades. His son and grandson.
He died at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah on February 24, 2024.
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