Mohammed Ghani Hikmat

Mohammed Ghani Hikmat (1929 to 2011) was an Iraqi sculptor, born in Baghdad; he died in Amman, Jordan. He worked in carved wood and cast bronze, and made public works for Baghdad, among them The Fountain of Kahramana, inaugurated in 1971, and Scheherazade and Shahrayar (1971).

Reclining Figure (1967), carved in teak, is in the collection of Mathaf. In 1959 he assisted Jewad Selim in casting the bronze for the Freedom Monument in Tahrir Square. His bronze maquette for that monument is in What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group at Mathaf in 2026. He had solo exhibitions in Rome in 1959, Beirut in 1968 and London in 1981.

Hikmat trained first at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts, finishing in 1953, and then at Rome's Accademia di Belle Arti until 1959. In Italy he also learnt to work metal at the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato in Rome and to cast bronze at a Pistoia foundry. He taught sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts and at the University of Baghdad's College of Architectural Engineering. He belonged to the Friends of Art Society, Al-Zawiya and the Baghdad Modern Art Group. He received the Gulbenkian Prize for Best Iraqi Sculptor in 1964 and the Lebanese State Prize in 1994.