August the Eleventh

Towards the end of his days, Subbi did not adopt radically new motifs in his work but rather kept revisiting familiar details and placed them in new combinations. In this painting, Subbi united a southern urban motif with abstract colour planes and brought in the additional nuances of the wrinkled white sheet (which he first used in the 1960s) and the blue sea. Thus, this work of art summarises many of the motifs that Subbi considered more or less significant throughout his career. Considering the artist’s age at the time of the completion of the painting, the brightly lit urban scene acquires a strong nostalgic flavour.