Born in 1926 in Baghdad, Khalid Al Rahhal Shaker obtained a diploma in sculpture from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 1947, where he studied under the supervision of Jewad Selim. In the 1950s, he started producing replicas of artifacts or artworks from Ancient Iraq art that existed in the Department of Antiquities of the Iraq Museum. A decade later, he received a government scholarship to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome and graduated in 1964 before coming back to Iraq. The career of Khalid Al Rahhal was intrinsically linked to a political context when the Baath Party had been in power since 1968 and notably during Saddam Hussein’s regime. Although it doesn’t correspond to propaganda, his oeuvre celebrates the national pride since he was commissioned to execute several public works like the Monument of the Unknown Soldier in 1982. And part of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, he revived the past taking inspiration from the Babylonian and Assyrian practice of sculpture that he interpreted in a modern artistic language using different materials such as bronze or gypsum. In his paintings, he employed an iconography understandable by a wider popular audience, notably integrating the images of the bull or the horse, traditional symbols of potency. Khalid Al Rahhal passed away in 1987 in Baghdad.

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