We were honored a few days ago with the visit of artist Ali Talib, who would stop for a lengthy pause on most of the works to share with us his opinion, observations and information about each of them.
Artist Ali Talib was born in 1944 in Basra, Iraq. He studied and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad and obtained a Diploma in Fine Arts in 1966. He founded, alongside his colleagues, the ‘Innovators Group’. Then he exhibited some of his artworks with the ‘Towards A New Vision’ Group. After a while he established new art group in Basra, with some of its artists, called ‘The Shadow Group’.
He completed his studies of art at Helwan University in Egypt in the mid-seventies; he returned and joined the teaching staff of the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. In the nineties, he left Iraq to join the teaching faculty at the College of Fine Arts at Yarmouk University in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, and then at the end of the nineties, he left to settle in the Netherlands. Now he lives between The Hague, Netherlands and Amman, Jordan, devoting himself to his art.
In the book of “Contemporary Art in Iraq - The Sixties Phase”; Adel Kamel wrote “Ali Talib’s works sought to grant art a deeper dimension than simulating or depicting reality in its exact form, not only because it is the symbolism of the direction, but rather because it is unique in the artistic treatment and in the discovery of the modern vision”.