Dia Al-Azzawi
Artist
Biography
Dia al-Azzawi (b. 1939, Baghdad) is an Iraqi visual artist, painter and sculptor based in London. He studied archaeology at the College of Arts, Baghdad, graduating in 1962, and then trained at the Institute of Fine Arts under Hafidh al-Droubi, graduating in 1964. Active in Baghdad's art groups, he founded the New Vision group (Al-Ru'yah al-Jadidah) in 1968 and wrote its manifesto, Towards a New Vision. He served as director of the Iraqi Antiquities Department in Baghdad (1968–76) before settling in London in the late 1970s, where he became artistic director of the Iraqi Cultural Centre. Associated with the Hurufiyya movement, his work draws on Mesopotamian myth, Arabic poetry and calligraphy, and bears witness to war and displacement, as in The Land of Sad Oranges (1973), after Ghassan Kanafani. His works are held in collections including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Institut du Monde Arabe, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Barjeel Art Foundation. (Source: Wikipedia)