Nazar Yahya Al-Saadi

Place: Baghdad

Born: 1960

Biography:

Nazar Yahya is an Iraqi artist born in Baghdad in 1960. He began exhibiting in Baghdad in the late 1970s and earned his B.F.A. at the Academy of Fine Arts, Baghdad in 1986. From 1986 to 1991, Nazar worked as a map painter in the Army’s rear lines. In 2003, during the outbreak of war in Iraq, he took his family to Amman, Jordan. Currently he lives in Houston, Texas. Nazar Yahya works on installations and inkjet on cotton paper projects. He began his work with metal creating etchings and later continued to works on canvas, as well as paper and photography. In his early career, Nazar worked on experiments with dafatir (singular: daftar); a new expression of artist's book, or art object, possessing a distinct postmodern interpretation of the Islamic manuscript production. During the 1990s and throughout the invasion, Dafatir as a vehicle of expression intensified in Iraq. Nazar Yahya's work has been exhibited in the Middle East, Europe, Bangladesh, and the United States. His notable works include 'Card of Illumination'.