Dia Al-Azzawi

Dia al-Azzawi was born in Baghdad in 1939. He earned a degree in Archaeology from the University of Baghdad in 1962 in addition to a diploma from the city’s Institute of Fine Arts in 1964. He then worked as an archaeologist in the Department of Antiquities in Baghdad until 1976, when he moved to London. He belonged to several art movements, including the New Vision Group, which he co-founded in 1969, the One Dimension group which he joined in 1971, and the Iraqi Plastic Artists’ Society, through which, as secretary, he established the Al-Wasiti Festival in Baghdad in 1972. He frequently showed his work in Beirut at Gallery One (1965, 1966, 1969, 1972) and Contact Art Gallery (1973, 1974). In London, he put on numerous exhibitions as the artistic advisor to the Iraqi Cultural Centre. Throughout his artistic career, he worked in a wide range of media from painting and drawing to monumental sculpture and portable artist books. His work has been widely exhibited and collected by public and private institutions, including Galerie Claude Lemand, Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris and Mathaf: Museum of Arab Modern Art in Doha, Qatar. A monograph of the artist by Catherine David was published in 2017. He continues to live in London where he has been in voluntary exile for more than four decades.