Old Jerusalem by Hosni Radwan

Hosni Radwan was born in Baghdad in 1955. He studied fine arts at the University of Baghdad specializing in graphics. He held a number of solo exhibitions in Iraq, Lebanon, Cyprus, Japan and Palestine. Radwan took part in international biennales including those of Berlin, Cairo and Sharja. He left Baghdad in 1979 and headed to Beirut where he worked in graphic design and journalism while continuing to draw and paint using his talents to express his position vis-à-vis the cause of his people.

Radwan’s works have special characteristics as they do not include realistic or political imitations. He seeks to photograph the external world in all of its spaces and its various states and situations, using techniques that go beyond colour and different materials, thus forming a world of his own. Details of the scenes in Baghdad have played a major role in his artistic experience, inspiring his work that has spanned over 25 years of ongoing production. He mixes acrylics with sand, wood and paper and other visible and tangible objects, creating a kind of mounds that surround his works and their special, abstract world. Radwan works at several levels using a mixture of acrylics and sand to open before us a mobile and dismantled world that resembles a sustainable space with all of its different components, reactions and subjective chaos. In the works in which he utilizes ink and watercolors on paper, he generates a strong feeling of music and sophism, giving a kind of soul to the paper.