Ismail Fattah was a unique phenomenon in the history of Iraqi art. Along with compatriots Jawad Salim and Khaled Rahhal, he sculpted and painted with an equal degree of passion and creativity, despite the huge differences between the two art forms. Prior to his death in 2004, Fattah told me that he painted to relieve the spiritual tension he felt when he was unable to execute his ideas in sculpture and, during that same conversation, went on to say that painting often caused him anguish and pain.

While Fattah had been known, since the 1960s, to possess a bias towards sculpture, even in his ink drawings and in many of his paintings, it is not surprising that during the last six years of his life he produced dozens of etchi...