b. Baghdad, Iraq, lives in New York

Bassim Al Shaker is an Iraqi artist based in the United States, born and raised in Baghdad during a period of political conflict and humanitarian torment. He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Baghdad College of Fine Arts, with a focus on drawing and painting, and later obtained his Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Al Shaker’s style is the culmination of a background in academic drawing and painting techniques combined with an ongoing exploration of contemporary art, drawing also on the influences of Mesopotamian and Babylonian culture. His work is rooted in his experience of conflict in the Middle East, including memories of witnessing bombings in Baghdad, and has historically taken the form of surreal, politically charged imagery. Since relocating to Chicago in 2019 to pursue his graduate studies, Al Shaker’s visual language has shifted toward greater abstraction, as he has sought a mode of expression better suited to processing his personal history than the academic and classical traditions in which he was originally trained. The result is a body of work suspended between contemporary abstraction and the painterly discipline of the Old Masters.

His artwork has garnered international attention, among them the 2013 Venice Biennale, documenta fifteen in Kassel in 2022, and the 2025 Aichi Triennale. For many years, he was represented by Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago.