When renowned British Iraqi visual artist Dia al-Azzawi first held a solo exhibition in the city he now calls home — London — it came about by pure coincidence. Presented in 1978 at the Patrick Seale Gallery, the exhibition drew largely on works he had brought from Baghdad when he relocated, alongside a smaller number of pieces completed after his arrival in the UK. At this early stage, Azzawi's paintings and etchings employed a muted, sandy colour palette that helped create an expressionistic, often existential mood, as seen in works such as Martyrs (1970), Man in Desert (1973), and Human States (1975).
Nearly five decades later, the London-based artist marks a significant milestone with his second solo presentation in the capital. Titled Excursion Across Time, the exhibition at Richard Saltoun Gallery is curated by Louisa Macmillan. As Head of Research at the Azzawi studio, she has worked closely with the artist for over a decade.
In this new iteration, the selection reflects the breadth of Azzawi’s practice across time and medium, bringing together bold, large-scale paintings, previously unseen works on paper, and material drawn from his studio archive. From Baghdad to the world Born in Baghdad in 1939, Azzawi’s career has unfolded across multiple cities, institutions, and cultural contexts, shaping a practice informed by both regional and international exchange. Within this trajectory, between 1968 and 1976, he worked as a curator at several Iraqi institutions, including the Iraq Museum, contributing to the development and practice of museum work in the country during a formative period.
Building on this experience, from 1977 to 1980, he was based in London at the Iraqi Cultural Centre, where he organised and curated a broad programme of exhibitions, helping to foster cultural exchange between Iraq and the UK. In the decades that followed, his work has been widely exhibited internationally. Notable solo presentations include those at the Ashmolean Museum (2022), Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and Al Riwaq (2016), the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation (2009), and the Institut du Monde Arabe (2001), as well as numerous group exhibitions worldwide.
Dafatir: A visual diwan At its core, Azzawi's practice is driven by a search for identity as both Arab and Iraqi, beginning with local Iraqi folklore and everyday life and gradually expanding into literature as a shared cultural thread across the Arabic-speaking world. This becomes particularly evident when moving through the gallery with Louisa and Mysa Kafil-Hussain, who works in Azzawi's London studio, where attention is drawn to his extensive body of Dafatir (artist's books). In particular, these works are closely connected to poetry, which Azzawi refers to as "the pillars" of his practice, and take a variety of forms that sometimes move close to sculpture, combining calligraphic writing with expressive, gestural mark-making.
Rather than being read in a conventional sense, they are intended to be viewed, creating a visual experience that reflects the central role of poetry in Arab culture and its oral tradition of recitation, and one example on display in the gallery is Excursion Across Time, a work based on a poem by Lebanese writer Talal Haidar that also gives the exhibition its title. Speaking to The New Arab about the Dafatir in greater detail, Azzawi says: "Dafatir are a form that resonates with the Arabic manuscript, one of the most important components of Islamic civilisation, which has left us manuscripts in literature, medicine, geography, astronomy, and more.
"For me, Dafatir are a contemporary achievement of the Islamic manuscript — an achievement worthy of pride — expressed through poetry, described as the 'diwan of the Arabs." "What I sought was to create a visual atmosphere for language, and to enrich it with colour and form, to deconstruct words that draw images for hearing. From here comes the value of the image as a tangible form that enriches emotion."
Revealing the nude Moving across the space, it is almost impossible to ignore Azzawi's distinctive use of bold, polychromatic abstraction. This is exemplified by the large, emblematic diptych Oriental Window, which is displayed in striking contrast to two monochrome works on paper from the 1960s, shown publicly here for the first time. In these early drawings, he brings together motifs drawn from everyday life in Iraq — architectural forms, vessels, geometric textile patterns, talismanic symbols, and invocations for protection — alongside human figures, flora, and trees, arranged into experimental compositions and more intimate visual scenes.
One work, in particular, features a rare surviving nude, its large, dark eyes evoking Sumerian sculpture, reflecting Azzawi's grounding in ancient history and archaeology, as well as his subsequent experience working as a museum curator in Iraq. Also shown publicly for the first time, these nudes form part of a broader curatorial decision. As Azzawi e