Aziz Salim (1917–2003) was born in the village of Qaladze which is near the city of Slemani in Iraqi Kurdistan. He learned how to draw and paint pictures from an early age, sometimes drawing on walls with pieces of charcoal. Coming from a fairly social family, his father was an intellectual and a friend to many of the politicians and elites at the time. Much of Salim’s youth was spent as a rebel as he was always protesting the Iraqi government at the time for their secondary treatment of Kurdish citizens and their continued refusal to grant them their independence as a nation. Subsequently, he ran away in 1936 and quit his medical studies at the University of Baghdad. Four years prior to that, he held his very first exhibition in Slemani at a cemetery where he earned himself the infamous title of “devil man” by an angry Muslim chief who later destroyed all his paintings in the exhibition and gathered a mob to try and stone him.
Salim is regarded as the first Kurdish artist, although it is debated that a man by the name of Othman Beg precedes him as noted in Jabra I. Jabra’s Flood and Freedom. As a self-taught artist, he was regarded as one of the first Kurdish artists to practice the naive art form. He had painted a lot of landscapes, portraits, and nationalist pieces of which many have been exhibited and collected in private/public collections throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Salim held several joint exhibitions before leaving Iraq in 1936 with the famous Kurdish-Jewish artist from Erbil, Daniel Uzear Qassab, who is remembered as the first academically educated Kurdish artist finishing his studies in the Fine Arts Institute of Baghdad. Salim continued to exhibit his artworks abroad including in 1943 at Gallery Krafis (Krofis) in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is rumored that in a 1945 trip to Europe, he met Pablo Picasso in Paris and the latter encouraged him to develop his style further, even as to include the style of cubism in his works. Another important year for Salim was 1949 where he set up three solo exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, and at the Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt, Germany.
After the failure of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad (1945–46) which Salim served in as a cultural advisor, he started to paint more politically — his landscapes became battle scenes and his portraits of everyday folk became portraits of nationalist Kurdish leaders and thinkers. In 1958, almost eight years after the death of the poet and writer Piramerd, Salim painted a portrait of him that still exists today and is housed in the offices of Zamwa Gallery in Slemani. This newly adjusted style also became a new problem for Salim who was already living as a nomad going from place to place. In the decades later, there were several tries and attempts on Salim’s life including one assassination attempt in 1979 that left him badly injured and killing his wife. However, Salim never sat down and stopped paintings, he continued to defy the authorities and paint his thoughts without any reluctance. He was given asylum in 1995 by the country of Finland where he stayed a short time and then returned back to live in Erbil. He passed away in 2003 and coincidentally his last exhibition was also held in the same year at Gallery Medya.
Aziz Salim was certainly one of Kurdistan’s greatest artists if not its greatest ever. He painted more than 6000 artworks between the 20th and 21st Centuries. I am quite saddened that many of my friends and colleagues in the art world don’t know about him which is why I wrote this article to begin with. There is some literature about him in the International Network for Contemporary Iraqi Artists (iNCia) website which is extended from the Strokes of Genius book edited by Maysaloun Faraj. There needs to be more written on this man and the monumental impact he has had on all artists in Kurdistan. To end this article, I leave you with a quote from an essay on Salim by Austrian artist and critic, Ulrich Gansert:
Aziz Salim is one of the most important representatives of the culture of the Kurdish people in the 20th Century.
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biography and description of the activities of contemporary Kurdish painters are refused and only the year of birth or the year of the beginning of the painter's activity is included along with samples of works.
it is also possible that some of these painters themselves are improvising a new style of painting.
it should be noted that the earliest paintings in history are related to antiquities and the first examples are found in the antiquities of the Kurdish nation.
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Site source Some biographies and gallery of painters have been blocked.For this reason, images of some posts are blocked.