What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group

What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group runs from 25 October 2026 to 6 February 2027. The group exhibition is at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Education City, Doha, and is curated by Nada Shabout. Much of what is on show comes from Mathaf's collection: paintings, sculptures, sketches, photographs and archival documents. It is laid out in seventeen thematic sections, from the 1940s to the present day.

Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said started the Baghdad Modern Art Group, Jamaat Baghdad Lil Fan al-Hadith, in 1951. They wanted a modern art that was made in Baghdad yet open to the wider world. Selim is represented by Baghdadiat (1956), in mixed media on hardboard, by Children's Games (1953) and by a sketch of 1959 for the Freedom Monument in Baghdad. Mohammed Ghani Hikmat's bronze maquette of the same monument is on view. The exhibition traces who joined and left the group in its first ten years and where it showed. It follows the efforts to keep it going after Selim's death in 1961, and the groups that came after it, among them the New Vision Group and al-Mujaddidin (1965). The Eighties Generation of Iraqi artists, most of whom now live in diaspora, also features. Wars and instability in Iraq, including the US-led invasion of 2003, have led to the loss of archives. Lost paintings and papers are marked in the show by the gaps they leave.

Exhibiting artists include Jewad Selim, Naziha Selim, Lorna Selim, Shakir Hassan Al Said, Faiq Hassan, Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Khalid Al Rahal, Faraj Abbo, Kadhim Haidar and Dia al-Azzawi. Faiq Hassan (1914 to 1992), who trained at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, founded the Al-Ruwad group in 1950, and Jewad Selim joined it. Naziha Selim, Jewad's sister, studied fresco and mural painting in Paris and taught at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts. Hikmat (1929 to 2011) helped cast the monument's bronze in Italy in 1959.

Mathaf, founded in 2010, is part of Qatar Museums. It presents the show as the third iteration of Shabout's research into the group. The same research produced All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group, shown by NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery from 12 February 2026 to 3 January 2027. Entry is free with museum admission; tickets are required.