Printmaking

Etching, lithography, woodcut, and screen printing have been at the heart of Arab modernism since the 1950s. Cairo's print workshops and Baghdad's mid-century studios trained generations of Arab printmakers, producing works that traveled the world in editions when paintings could not. The medium's accessibility and reproducibility gave political dimension to its practice: Iraqi master Rafa Nasiri used printmaking as a vehicle for poetry collaborations with Mahmoud Darwish; Palestinian artists used the print as a tool of cultural resistance. Today, modern Arab prints remain among the most collected categories of work — affordable entry points into major artists, often produced as signed limited editions of exceptional craftsmanship.