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.
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.
