Aziz Salim (1917–2003) was born in the town of Qaladze which is near the city of Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan. He learned how to draw and paint pictures from an early age, sometimes drawing on walls with pieces of charcoal. Coming from a fairly social family, his father was an intellectual and a friend to many of the politicians and elites at the time. Much of Salim’s youth was spent as a rebel as he was always protesting the Iraqi government at the time for their secondary treatment of Kurdish citizens and their continued refusal to grant them their independence as a nation. Subsequently, he ran away in 1936 and quit his medical studies at the University of Baghdad. Four years prior to that, he held his very first exhibition in Slemani at a cemetery where he earned himself the infamous title of “devil man” by an angry Muslim chief who later destroyed all his paintings in the exhibition and gathered a mob to try and stone him.
Salim is regarded as the first Kurdish artist, although it is debated that a man by the name of Othman Beg precedes him as noted in Jabra I. Jabra’s Flood and Freedom. As a self-taught artist, he was regarded as one of the first Kurdish artists to practice the naive art form. He had painted a lot of landscapes, portraits, and nationalist pieces of which many have been exhibited and collected in private/public collections throughout the Middle East, Europe, and the U.S. Salim held several joint exhibitions before leaving Iraq in 1936 with the famous Kurdish-Jewish artist from Erbil, Daniel Uzear Qassab, who is remembered as the first academically educated Kurdish artist finishing his studies in the Fine Arts Institute of Baghdad. Salim continued to exhibit his artworks abroad including in 1943 at Gallery Krafis (Krofis) in Baku, Azerbaijan. It is rumored that in a 1945 trip to Europe, he met Pablo Picasso in Paris and the latter encouraged him to develop his style further, even as to include the style of cubism in his works. Another important year for Salim was 1949 where he set up three solo exhibitions in Paris, Amsterdam, and at the Academy of Fine Art in Frankfurt, Germany.
After the failure of the short-lived Republic of Mahabad (1945–46) which Salim served in as a cultural advisor, he started to paint more politically — his landscapes became battle scenes and his portraits of everyday folk became portraits of nationalist Kurdish leaders and thinkers. In 1958, almost eight years after the death of the poet and writer Piramerd, Salim painted a portrait of him that still exists today and is housed in the offices of Zamwa Gallery in Sulaymaniyah. This newly adjusted style also became a new problem for Salim who was already living as a nomad going from place to place. In the decades later, there were several tries and attempts on Salim’s life including one assassination attempt in 1979 that left him badly injured and killing his wife. However, Salim never sat down and stopped paintings, he continued to defy the authorities and paint his thoughts without any reluctance. He was given asylum in 1995 by the country of Finland where he stayed a short time and then returned back to live in Erbil. He passed away in 2003 and coincidentally his last exhibition was also held in the same year at Gallery Medya.[1]