maurice haddad (1937)
Haddad Maurice is a contemporary painter from South Iraq. Encountering the work of Haddad Maurice for the first time, one can not help noticing the diversity of his compositional approaches, his media and materials. There are water color paintings that at first sight seem almost conventional, but that bear witness to an awareness of country life, sharp observation, an ability to catch moods. The works showing Iraqi women, real beauties, one might say, are close to folk art: bright, colorful, geometrical, and basically well-balanced in their formal language that relies on curves, segments of circles intercutting each other. Some works are mythological both in their formal language and their historical reference. In the case of these works, often wood instead of canvas is used as a surface.