Hadi Abbas

Hadi Abbas was an Iraqi sculptor, ceramicist and painter whose working life ran from his graduation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1967 until his death in September 2026. Quiet in public manner, colleagues described him as a craftsman who stayed loyal to clay, stone and paint through decades of political upheaval, choosing not to trade artistic independence for official favour under the former regime and remaining in Iraq when many peers left.

In his first academy year he trained in ceramics with the Cypriot artist Valentinos, founder of the ceramics department, before moving into sculpture under the major Iraqi sculptor Mohammed Ghani Hikmet, later working alongside him. Abbas helped found the Alwan Group of Iraqi sculptors with colleagues including Ittihad Karim, Abdul Rahim al-Hassan, Laith Fattah al-Turk and Khalid al-Mubarak, and he established what sources describe as the first ceramics association in Baghdad. He worked across sculpture, ceramics and painting with equal seriousness, held three solo exhibitions, took part in many group shows inside and outside Iraq, and left works in collections and public settings.

He spoke of childhood hours playing with clay near his father, linking that early material habit to a longer Mesopotamian love of earth and mark-making. In later interviews he said fame at home under dictatorship had often required praise of power, a price he refused to pay, while exile was a price he could not pay because he could not leave the country that held every element of his life. After 2003 he welcomed wider creative freedom even as he noted early post-change years of political neglect of the arts and danger for artists. His enduring dream, he said, was a Baghdad monument to the Thousand and One Nights, a story he read as an eternal contest between desire and wisdom.

The Iraqi Artists Syndicate announced that Abbas died on Monday, 21 September 2026, mourning a sculptor who had practised with youthful energy to the end. Earlier that year the Nakhil Iraqi cultural organisation had honoured him at an evening in Baghdad's Waziriya district, a late public recognition of a career built on persistence rather than celebrity.