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Abstract

This paper provides a comparative analysis of the embryonic Surrealism of two well-known figures of the era: Jamil Hamoudi, an Iraqi surrealist artist, and Aminullah Rezaei, an Iranian surrealist artist. The results found that Surrealism in Iraq associated itself with cultural identity and sacred symbolism, unveiling Hamoudi as the merger of geometry, calligraphy, and warm colours, towards reshaping the collective unconscious and reformulating Eastern spirituality in a modernist fashion. While Surrealism itself was an American import, Surrealism in Iran was contained within a frame of clinical satire, with Rezaei using hybrid bodies and anatomical distortions within realism and fantasy to articulate individual identity crises and psychiatric trauma, as well as to journey into socially and politically critical territory. It argues that these artists crystallised their work based on their socio-political contexts, resulting in the emergence of two different Surrealisms in the two countries — sacred Surrealism in Iraq as opposed to critical, satirical Surrealism in Iran — and by tracing the differences — aesthetic, conceptual, and technical — between the two artists, the study concludes that it is these differences in cultural, political and psychological contexts that were most responsible for the divergent paths of Surrealism in the two countries.

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