The Baghdad Modern Art Group, the collective that reshaped Iraqi art in the 1950s, is the subject of a new exhibition at NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery that treats its legacy as a living resource rather than a closed chapter. "All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group", curated by Nada Shabout, is on view through 3 January 2027.

The group was founded in 1951 by two of Iraq's most influential artists, Jewad Selim (1919-1961) and Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925-2004), and grew to draw in many of the country's leading artists, architects and poets. Its members sought a modern Iraqi art rooted in local heritage rather than imported styles, blending Mesopotamian and Islamic traditions with the languages of European modernism, and their manifestos and exhibitions set the terms for modern art in Iraq for decades.

Shabout, who has published widely on modern and contemporary Arab and Iraqi art, brings together the group's artists and their inheritors, tracing how its ideas have echoed through later generations. The exhibition frames the collective not as a historical footnote but as a continuing conversation, with its experiments in form, identity and nationhood still resonating across the region.

Staged in the United Arab Emirates, the show also reflects the Gulf's growing role as a home for modern Arab art history. For audiences in Abu Dhabi, it offers a rare chance to see the work of a movement that helped define what modern art could mean in Iraq, presented alongside the artists who carry its questions forward today.