Dia Al Azzawi

Dia Azzawi, born in Baghdad in 1939, is an Iraqi artist whose impressive oeuvre negotiates new relationships between the past and the present, the local and the international. Though he has resided in London for many years, the artist’s training took place in his native Iraq. He graduated from Baghdad University in 1962 with a degree in archaeology and earned a Diploma in Fine Arts from the Baghdad Institute of Fine Arts in 1964. After completing his studies, he worked for the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad until his move to the English capital in 1976. Azzawi’s paintings incorporate motifs from ancient Mesopotamian visual culture, Islamic traditions of calligraphy, and Western modernist principles of abstraction to comment on the political instability of the Middle East and reflect upon the artist’s experiences living between cultures.

Azzawi was politically active from an early age, and from the very beginning, faced the consequences for his passionate self-expression. In fact, the young artist was expelled from school in 1956, when he was seen demonstrating in support of Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. However, his artistic skills ultimately earned him re-admission; he was called back after King Faysal II visited his school and admired his paintings. The monarch was so impressed by young Azzawi’s talent that he invited him to his palace, promising to send him to study art in Italy. The fall of the monarchy in 1958 prevented the king from fulfilling his promise, however, and Azzawi did not ultimately study in Italy. Azzawi once again faced punishment for his political opinions in 1963, when his open opposition to the Baath coup leads to three months of imprisonment. 

Azzawi’s lifelong involvement with Iraqi artists’ groups began in the 1960s with the encouragement of his first and most significant mentor, Hafidh al-Droubi. Al-Droubi, a giant in the arts community of Baghdad, brought Azzawi into the Impressionists art collective, of which he was the director. Azzawi was later associated with the Baghdad Group of Modern Art and Istilham Al Turath (“Inspiration from Tradition”), both of which were formed by Jawad Selim, and Jamaat Al Baoud Al Wahid (“One Dimension Group”), founded by Shaker Hassan Al Said. In 1968, Azzawi partnered with artists Ismail Fatah al-Turk, Muhammed Muhr al-Din, Hashimi al-Samarchi, Salih Jumai’e, and Rafa al-Nasiri to establish the Jamaat Al Ruyya Al Jadidah (“New Vision Group”), which released a manifesto arguing that art should be stylistically free but directly engaged with contemporary sociopolitical realities. In the increasingly repressive cultural regime of Baathist Iraq, New Vision proposed art as a site for speaking the truth in conditions of untruth. The group also called for a critical reassessment of cultural heritage and its role in art, arguing that “heritage is not a prison, a static phenomenon or a force capable of repressing creativity so long as we have the freedom to accept or challenge its norms.”

In keeping with New Vision ideals, Azzawi’s work has engaged creatively with politics and cultural heritage throughout his career. In the early 1960s, he made figurative images and sculptures with deep connections to mythology and history, inspired by Sumerian traditions such as the epic of Gilgamesh. In the 1970s, he produced what he called Al Qaseedah Al Marsumah (“the drawn poem”), conceptualized as a “visual extension” of poetry such as that in the pre-Islamic Al Muaalaqat al Sabaa. This work developed into Dafatir, artists’ books that were hand-painted and calligraphed, that gave visual form to poems by contemporary poets such as Mahmoud Darwish, Al-Seyab, and Adonis. During this period, Azzawi was moved by political causes beyond Iraq, especially the liberation of Palestine. In response to the events of Black September in 1970, for example, he produced an art book based on the journal of a freedom fighter during the siege of the Jebel Hussein refugee camp in Amman, entitled A Witness of Our Times (1972). After esteemed Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, who was a close friend of Azzawi’s, was assassinated by Mossad in 1972, Azzawi created The Land of Sad Oranges, a set of black and white drawings depicting limp bodies and faceless heads that was based on Kanafani’s short story of the same name. Azzawi’s work would continue to tackle tragedies from throughout the Arab world, perhaps best exemplified by his epic mural-size drawing Sabra & Shatila (1982-1983). This massive work depicts the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israeli and Phalangist troops during the Lebanese civil war and has drawn a comparison to Picasso’s Guernica.

In 1975, Azzawi left Iraq for the first time to participate in a printmaking workshop in Austria. Inspired by this experience and deeply frustrated by Baath censorship, Azzawi decided to pursue further studies in printmaking in London, where he settled in 1976. While the artist has remained in London, he continues to draw equally from Arab and Western visual vocabularies. Azzawi has incorporated abstraction into his work since the 1960s, and many of his works might evoke the oeuvres of Picasso, Braque, and Leger. He is also a significant contributor to the development of Hurufiyya, a set of aesthetic principles for the use of Islamic calligraphy in modern art, apparent in his integration of the Arabic letter in bold compositions of vibrant colors, expressive lines, and geometric forms. In addition to painting, Azzawi creates small and large- scale sculptures in geometric and organic shapes, often inspired by natural objects such as the desert rose. His work exploits a wide variety of materials, including terracotta, wood, bronze, and polyester resin. 

After more than forty years in self-imposed exile, Azzawi still works and resides in London.

Sources

Faruki Samar, Dia Azzawi: Something Different. Dubai, United Arab Emirates: Publications Department of Meem Gallery with Art Advisory Associated Ltd. 2015.

Faruki Samar, Art in Iraq Today. Milano, Italy: Skira Editore S.p.A.2011

Dia Azzawi, Ballad’s to Bilad Al Sawad, By Nada Shabout. Accessed September 7 ,2017. 

“Dia Al Azzawi: Political Landscapes.” Aesthetica Magazine. Accessed September 7,2017.

“Frieze Dia al Azzawi, Selected works,1964-73.” Ruya Foundation. Accessed September 8 ,2017.

“Dia – al Azzawi: Iraqi Artist Blossoms in Exile. Al-Akhbar English. Accessed September 8 ,2017. 

“Dia-Al Azzawi Biography”. Mathaf Encyclopedia of Modern Art and the Arab World. Accessed September 8, 2017.

“Befriended by a king, arrested, then forced to fight-Artist Dia Azzawi on the destruction of his beloved Iraq”. The Telegraph. Accessed September 8 ,2017.

Dia Azzawi- CV. Accessed October 3, 2017. 

‘I felt I was more connected in a way with Arab art.’ by Martin Gayford. Accessed October 3, 2017