From Mesopotamia

Azzawi studied art and archeology at the Faculty of Arts at Baghdad University. He began to combine techniques of contemporary painting with motifs drawn from the Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian heritage of Iraq, and with geometric and arabesque patterns drawn from the contemporary tribal culture of the desert. From the 1970s, he also began to produce sculpture using the same motifs, of which the present work From Mesopotamia is a prime example and a praise of Iraq's rich archeological and cultural heritage. For example, the four-pointed star in a circle at the centre of Azzawi's bronze relief is a recurrent motif found in Babylonian reliefs and represents the Sun God Shamash's Solar disk. The crescent under the eye on Azzawi's sculpture refers to Sin or Nanna, who was the God of the Moon in Mesopotamian mythology.

As Alain Jouffroy pointed out in the catalogue published for the 2001 exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, entitled Dia Azzawi, Une modernité poisitive, there are similarities between Dia Azzawi's approach to Sumerian sculpture and reliefs, and Pablo Picasso's to African and Iberian art, in the way they both incorporated and interpreted elements of the two types of art into their own pictorial and sculptural vocabulary, inventing a new form of universal modernity. However, there is no nostalgia or looking back at the culture of the past in Azzawi's works. Jouffroy yet again explains how Azzawi's oeuvre 'affirms eternal solidarity between different but converging cultures and civilisations' and how 'his aim is to increase the well-being of all through creation alone'. (A. Jouffroy in exh. cat.,Dia Azzawi, Une modernité poisitive, Paris, 2001).