Dia Azzawi

Dia Azzawi (born 1939) is an Iraqi born painter and sculptor, now living and working in London and one of the pioneers of modern Arab art. He is noted for incorporating Arabic script into his paintings. Active in the arts community, he founded the Iraqi art group known as New Vision and has been an inspiration to a generation of young, calligraffiti artists.

Azzawi studied archaeology at the College of Arts in Baghdad, graduating in 1962 and later studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, under the guidance of the eminent Iraqi artist, Hafidh al-Droubi, and graduating in 1964.By day, he studied the ancient world, and by night he studied he studied European painting.

Azzawi was part of the generation of people that saw their countries and homelands fall to bloody dictatorships and wars, and so much of his work is a commentary on the destruction and devastation of Iraq due to war and invasion. His piece, My Broken Dream , a colossal monochromatic work, four meters in height and ten in length, is an assemblage of shapes, limps and swords, and it is an attempt to document a peoples pain, and in the written statement of the artwork, he writes, “Iraq is my inner soul." In addition, Azzawi doesn’t only give voice to his own plight, but to those who are silenced as well, including that of Palestine and Iraqi Kurdistan. One example, The Land of Sad Oranges, is a set of black and white drawings consisting of faceless heads and limp bodies, based on the short story of the same name by Palestinian writer, Ghassan Kanafani. Azzawi was inspired to draw this set after Kanafani, a close friend of his, was murdered in 1972 by the Mossad[24] and in these drawings, he tries to explore the condition of statelessness and particularly the effect it has on the individual. In an interview with Saphora Smith for the Telegraph in 2016, Azzawi said, “I feel I am a witness. If I can give a voice to somebody who has no voice, that is what I should do,” and with this work he tries to document the inner struggle of refugees and explore themes of exile and displacement