Dia Al-Azzawi's fifty-year London journey debuts at Richard Saltoun

Richard Saltoun Gallery presents Excursion Across Time, a historical overview of the career of British-Iraqi artist Dia AL-AZZAWI (b. Baghdad, 1939), curated by Louisa Macmillan. This exhibition marks half a century since Azzawi moved to London, although it is only his second solo show in the city he calls home (the first was in 1978). The presentation is centred around recurring themes that shaped his early practice and continue to inspire his work. Large, colourful, emblematic paintings are displayed alongside works on paper that have never been exhibited before, in addition to selected material from the Azzawi studio archive, telling the story of how a former archaeologist and museum curator inspired by artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia, as well as ethnographic motifs from daily life, helped to shape Iraqi modernism in the 1960s. Azzawi later expanded his quest for identity to explore cultural themes that would