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 | Hafidh al-Droubi was born in Baghdad, Iraq in 1914. Al-Droubi was educated at the Accademia Reale in Rome and Goldsmiths College in London. He established Iraq's first free artist studio and was a founding member of the Society of the Friends of Art. Al-Droubi established the Impressionist Group, one of three important art groups in Iraq during the 1950s. His art practice was marked by variety as he moved easily between the styles of realism to cubism. The painter, however, rarely strayed from representations of Iraqi daily life. Al-Droubi exhibited at the 1952 Avicenna show in Baghdad and at the 1965 Beirut Exhibition of Contemporary Iraqi Art. Along with receiving honorary awards from the Society of Iraqi Plastic Arts, he was also one of only four artists to be honored at the Al-Wasiti Festival in 1972. Al-Droubi's work can be appreciated today in museums, government buildings, and at universities. Al-Droubi died in 1991 in Baghdad, Iraq.
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 | Mohanna Durra was born on 13 November 1938 in Amman, Jordan. He is a pioneer of Jordan's modern art movement. Early in his career, he established himself as a portrait painter, capturing a range of subjects from anonymous peasants and Bedouins to Amman's society personalities. He is perhaps most well-known for his portraits of clowns depicted in an expressionist style. Alongside his portraits is an equally fascinating body of abstract compositions. Dating to the early sixties, and representing some of the earliest examples in Jordan of abstract painting, Durra's compositions document a range of technique and method, united through a sustained exploration of light and dynamism.
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 | Salim al-Dabbagh, the renowned Iraqi artist printmaker, is one of a generation of artists who enriched the progress of modern art movements in Iraq during the mid-1960s. Born on 10 January in Mosul in 1941, al-Dabbagh studied at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad. Al-Dabbagh was one of the founders of the "Innovative Group" of artists in 1965. The Iraqi Artists Association (IAA) nominated al-Dabbagh to receive a two-year scholarship granted by the Gulbenkian Foundation to study graphic design at the Gravura Atelier in Lisbon, Portugal in 1967. Though trained in purely classical and realistic artistic techniques, al-Dabbagh adopts an audacious attitude towards creativity and experimentation with abstraction, resorting to several aesthetic traits, tones of black and white, mass, volume and semi-geometric compositions. He also uses iconic cultural elements such as 'al-wabar' (goat hair) as a medium in his artwork. His style highlights an intricate interplay between the dimensions of surface space and mass.
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