WAMI (Yasseen Wami & Hashim Taeeh)
WAMI is an artistic partnership quite rare in Iraq. Yasseen Wami (b. 1973, Basra, Iraq) and Hashim Taeeh (b. 1948, Basra, Iraq) work together to make installations of furniture from new and used cardboard. The modest material and basic, minimalist style they prefer are entirely at odds with a popular taste in Iraq for gilded home furnishings.…
Kadhim Nwir
The abstract canvases of Kadhim Nwir (b. 1967, Qadisiyah, Iraq) reflect urban life through a combination of distressed colour and graffiti-like drawing. Stencilled letters and numbers sometimes convey clear messages – “IRAQ”, “2003” – or they embody a meaning known only to the artist, superimposed on layers of vague pictorial references. Such expressive and complex mark-making,…
Bassim Al-Shaker
One of the youngest artists in the exhibition, Bassim Al-Shaker (b. 1986, Baghdad, Iraq) is stylistically one of its most traditional, making oil paintings that would very much impress his teachers at the local academy. Eschewing any sign of avant-gardism he paints scenes of the southern marshlands, suggesting a lifestyle there of unbroken tradition. The recent…