“My work is a reaction to war, not a chronicle. I am repeating the shock over and over again, to rid myself of the nightmare.” — Serwan Baran
Serwan Baran is an Iraqi-Kurdish painter and sculptor born in Baghdad in 1968. He received a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Babylon in Hillah, Iraq, and later taught at the College of Fine Arts at Baghdad University. Now based in Beirut, Baran has developed a figurative practice shaped by Iraq’s modern history, war, displacement, memory, and the human condition.
Baran’s work moves between painting and sculpture, often using the body as a site of political and psychological tension. His figures include soldiers, generals, prisoners, workers, dogs, and wounded bodies, presented with a directness that reflects both personal memory and collective violence. His visual language combines realism with expressive distortion, muted surfaces, and heavy forms, allowing the image to carry the weight of trauma without turning it into spectacle.
In the 1990s, Baran exhibited widely in Iraq and received several early awards, including a youth prize in Baghdad in 1990 and prizes at the Baghdad International Festival of Plastic Arts in 1994 and 1995. In 2000, he participated in the Summer Academy at Darat al Funun in Amman, where he worked under the mentorship of Syrian artist Marwan Kassab-Bachi.
His major exhibitions include Fatherland, presented at the Iraqi Pavilion during the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, where he became the first solo artist to represent Iraq at the Biennale. Other solo exhibitions include Canines at Agial Art Gallery, Beirut; A Harsh Beauty at Saleh Barakat Gallery, Beirut; and Indelible Memory at Gallery Misr, Cairo.
Baran’s practice is rooted in the lived and inherited realities of conflict, but it also questions how violence is remembered, repeated, and represented. Through painting and sculpture, he continues to examine the fragile relationship between power, survival, and the body.
