Iyad Almosawi — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Iyad Almosawi: The Monumental Courage of Form

To write about Iyad Almosawi is to step into a chamber where art becomes less an act of making and more an act of being. Across more than four decades, Almosawi has carved his name not as a painter bound to a style but as a philosopher of form, a visionary whose life has been consumed by a single radical pursuit: the refusal to settle. His art, whether in the soft velvety sediment of charcoal or in the burning alchemy of acrylic and pigment, offers society not mere images but meditations. They are investigations, rigorous and fearless, into memory, identity, and resilience.

A Canadian-Iraqi, Almosawi has carried the dual weight of cultural inheritance and modernist inquiry with equal mastery. From his studies in printmaking at Concordia University in Montreal to his recognition by the Outstanding Artist Award in Quebec in 1992 and his residency at the Banff Centre, he has been a figure unafraid of difficult terrains both geographic and aesthetic.

For more than forty years, he has treated art not as repetition but as research. His practice is conceived as a series of deep investigations. Each project begins with a unique thematic concept, a new intellectual and aesthetic question, and from this question grows a distinct language of form, material, and technique. The process is never mechanical. It is a dialogue between idea and medium, between the impulse of thought and the resistance of charcoal, paper, canvas, or pigment. Every exhibition becomes a culmination of this concentrated inquiry, a world in itself. Across his twenty-seven solo exhibitions, presented in Baghdad, Morocco, Canada, London, Dubai, Bangkok, Riyadh, and beyond, Almosawi has revealed not a sequence of retrospectives but an atlas of ideas. Each show stands as a testament to the courage of beginning again, a refusal to rely on formula, a fearless leap into the unknown.

Like Picasso in the Cubist years or Giacometti in the long shadow of existential Europe, Almosawi belongs to that rare sphere of artists for whom reinvention is not an indulgence but a necessity. His significance for society lies not only in the power of the works themselves but in the very act of refusal, the refusal to stagnate, the refusal to be reduced to commodity. His life’s journey demonstrates what he himself believes, that true artistry lies in the courage to continually begin anew, to question, and to search for what has not yet been found.

It is in his most recent body of large-scale works, presented in Morocco and Baghdad, that Almosawi has achieved perhaps his most urgent clarity. Here, color is stripped away. The canvas is pared down to black and white, the eternal dialectic of light and shadow. What appears reductive at first glance is, in truth, expansive. Charcoal on canvas becomes not a limitation but an opening, a theatre in which texture, gesture, and scale achieve their most eloquent form.

The choice of charcoal is deliberate. It is fought with, sculpted, and negotiated. Its inherent malleability allows for extraordinary range: smoky whispers of gray that dissolve into light, and deep, velvety blacks that contain within them the weight of history. On this monumental scale, the surface is not passive. It breathes, pulses, and resists. It becomes a site of physical and emotional intensity.

Take African Lady with Mirror (2023), a 120 x 100 cm charcoal on canvas. The work is at once intimate and monumental, the figure both immediate and mythic. The mirror, that timeless symbol of self-reflection and illusion, becomes here an arena where identity folds in on itself, blurred by charcoal’s smoky ambiguity. The question lingers: what does it mean to see, and to be seen?

Similarly, Confect (2023) abandons color for gestural abstraction. Here Almosawi harnesses charcoal’s violence, its slashes and spirals, its fractured geometries, to evoke both physical and emotional intensity. The canvas feels less like a surface than a palimpsest of struggle, each stroke a scar of memory.

In Red Land (2023), charcoal collides with acrylic, the black and the red locked in eternal combat between ash and fire, destruction and renewal. It feels simultaneously archaeological and prophetic, like a recovered fragment of history and a warning for the future.

Nowhere does Almosawi’s recent vision achieve greater power than in his mural-scale works. These are not paintings in the conventional sense. They are environments, fields of intensity into which viewers are compelled to step.

Faces (252 x 142 cm) is one such work. An army of visages fills the canvas, disjointed and overlapping, rendered in stark black charcoal. They stare out at us, fractured and multiplied, resisting singular identity. The effect is overwhelming, immersive. One does not simply view the work, one is consumed by it. They are not portraits but archetypes, echoes of collective memory, fragments of a society both shattered and resilient.

In Couple (190 x 155 cm), intimacy itself is made monumental. This is not a depiction of sentimental love but of human duality, two presences in eternal dialogue and tension.

Burning Land (218 x 158 cm) extends this vision into landscape. Charcoal becomes flame, the surface alive with destruction and renewal. Few contemporary artists dare to reduce themselves to essentials in this way: black, white, line, shadow. In Almosawi’s hands, this restraint is transformed into a power more intense than chromatic excess.

Mask (196 x 132 cm) goes further. Here identity itself becomes performance, a fragile architecture revealed and dismantled at once. Screens (172 x 130 cm) addresses our contemporary obsession with multiplicity, the proliferation of mediated images, the endless screens that fracture our gaze. Yet Almosawi refuses the sleekness of technology. Charcoal resists, grounding vision in the grit of hand and surface, reminding us of the tactile presence of the mark.

Alongside these works stand smaller but equally striking canvases. ARROS (105 x 105 cm) compresses energy into abstraction, its swirling density suggesting chaos held in suspension. Snack (2023) is intimate yet unsettling, where fragmented torsos and faces dissolve into dreamlike assemblages. Other mask-like portraits, elongated, anguished, distorted, call to mind Paul Klee or early Picasso, yet they bear the unmistakable urgency of Almosawi’s time and place.

In tessellated works such as Faces in Screens, individuality dissolves into archetype. And in sprawling horizontal compositions such as Burning Cityscape, Almosawi produces something akin to a contemporary Guernica: a charcoal symphony of devastation, dissonance, and resilience.

Why is Iyad Almosawi so important to society today? Because in a world drowning in surface and spectacle, he insists on depth. His works are not decorative but diagnostic. They speak to resilience in Baghdad, to memory in Morocco, to exile and belonging in Canada. They remind us that art is not an accessory to life but a necessity of being human.

For the Arab world, his work is a bridge, connecting contemporary practice with historical consciousness, insisting that modernity must carry memory within it. For the West, he offers an alternative to consumerist spectacle, art as inquiry rather than commodity. For both, he offers courage, the courage to strip down, to begin again, to make black and white more powerful than a thousand colors.

Within the global art scene, Almosawi occupies a singular position: both insider and outsider, East and West, figural and abstract. He is not a regionalist, nor does he capitulate to international trends. He pursues integrity. As Fulbright Scholar John Dishman has observed, Almosawi stands among the most important of his generation and will form the foundation for a fresh chapter in art history.

One might compare him to Käthe Kollwitz, the German artist who used charcoal and print to translate anguish and resilience into indelible form. Like Kollwitz, Almosawi transforms fragility into permanence, turning the most vulnerable of materials into monuments.

At the heart of Iyad Almosawi’s art lies a conviction both radical and simple: that true artistry is the courage to continually begin anew. In a world too easily seduced by repetition and spectacle, he offers a model of endless research, fearless inquiry, and renewal through reduction. His monumental black-and-white canvases are not mere paintings. They are existential landscapes, mirrors in which we see resilience, fragility, endurance, and transcendence.

Almosawi is not only a contemporary artist but also a custodian of memory, a conjurer of form, and an explorer of the human condition. His place in the art scene is permanent, not as a figure of fashion but as a voice bridging cultures, eras, and philosophies. Like Giacometti before him, he has carved existence into form. And like all great artists, he shows us that art, at its essence, is not about providing answers but about summoning the courage to keep asking questions.

In the chiaroscuro of his monumental canvases, society encounters not only the essence of drawing but the essence of being. His oeuvre insists that we look longer, think deeper, and feel more urgently. Fragility and resilience, devastation and beauty, collapse and renewal, these are not opposites but cohabitants in his work. The simplest gestures, black on white, line against void, contain the entire human drama.

To stand before an Almosawi canvas is to feel the intimacy of a whispered confession and the gravity of a cathedral. It is to sense that art still carries revelation. His canvases will outlast their moment because they do not belong to fashion; they belong to time. Almosawi confirms what we have always known but too often forget: the truest purpose of art is not to mirror the world but to transform it.

By Marta Puig

Editor Contemporary Art Curator Magazine