Biography

Iyad Almosawi Iraqi-Canadian Contemporary Artist For over four decades, Iyad Almosawi has been one of the defining voices of contemporary Arab art. Born in Baghdad and based between Canada and the Middle East, his work fuses the visual memory of Mesopotamia with a modern global sensibility.

faces , size: 252 x 142 cm , black charcoal on canvas, 2023

Educated in printmaking and fine arts in Montreal, Almosawi has exhibited widely across the world, with over twenty solo exhibitions in Baghdad, Montreal, Rabat, Dubai, London, Kuwait, and Toronto. His monumental works, murals, and installations combine geometry, symbolism, and poetic abstraction to explore identity, memory, and transformation.

couple , 2024, size: 190 x 155 cm , black charcoal on canvas,

Almosawi’s art has been described by critics as “a courageous dialogue between heritage and innovation” and “a poetic architecture of emotion and form.” In her 2025 essay for Contemporary Art Curator Magazine, Marta Puig wrote that “Almosawi’s paintings are not simply composed—they are breathed into being; they move between silence and revelation, embodying a monumental courage of form.”

His works are held in notable collections including The Canada Council Art Bank, Museum of Modern Art (Ottawa), and Mercedes-Benz International, and his large-scale mural projects have become landmarks of public art in the Middle East.

2023 masks , size : 196 x 132 cm , black charcoal on canvas

Over the years, ALMOSAWI has also contributed as a critic and thinker, publishing essays on modern Arab art and the evolving language of abstraction. Today, he remains committed to exploring the intersection between matter and meaning , transforming memory into light, and form into philosophy.

2024 , screens , size : 170 x 130 cm , black charcoal on canvas

Artist Statement

My art is a continuous act of discovery — an experiment in transforming memory, emotion, and material into form. For more than four decades, I have explored the boundaries between painting, printmaking, sculpture, and architecture, seeking to dissolve the separation between what is seen and what is felt.

2024, arguments, size : 250 x 220 cm , black charcoal on canvas m

Nature has always been my first teacher. In its rhythms, colors, and silences, I find the origins of form , the geometry of leaves, the transparency of light, the patience of stone. From these I learn balance and renewal. My childhood in Baghdad, surrounded by the scent of earth and the hum of ancient walls, continues to echo through every surface I touch. It is from that early intimacy with place that my visual language was born.

claiming supremacy, size: 200 x 160 cm, black charcoal on canvas

Heritage, for me, is not a nostalgic return; it is a living dialogue. The calligraphic line, the Mesopotamian symbol, the rhythm of Islamic ornament — these are fragments of a vast cultural DNA that I reinterpret through a contemporary lens. They become metaphors for continuity and transformation, bridges between the visible and the invisible, between history and imagination.

2022, godfather, size : 120 x 90 cm. charcoal colors & acrylic color on canvas .

The feminine presence also moves deeply through my work. I see it not only as subject, but as an energy — intuitive, generative, protective. The female form, whether abstract or symbolic, becomes a vessel of creation, a reflection of nature’s capacity to endure and to heal.

2022 , gossip action, sise220 x 80 cm, acrylic color & black charcoal on canvas .

I question history because I believe art must speak beyond it , must reveal what history hides. Through my practice, I attempt to reconstruct fragments of collective memory into visions of the future, to turn loss into light, and silence into dialogue. Each work is both a remembrance and a proposal , a vision of what humanity might become when we learn again to see through the eyes of wonder.

2022 red land, size: 150 x 120 cm , acrylic color & black charcoal on canvas

In essence, my art is a search for harmony between the tangible and the spiritual, the ancient and the futuristic. It is not an answer, but a journey, one that continues to ask: what remains when time itself becomes the canvas?

@iyadalmosawi.art