Considered a key figure in Iraq’s modern art movement, Shakir Hassan Al Said used art as a vehicle for spiritual reflection. After receiving a degree in social science, Al Said pursued painting at Baghdad’s Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied under Jewad Selim and held his first solo show in 1954. He co-founded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art with Selim before travelling to study in Paris at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. Upon his return to Baghdad, Al Said taught at the Institute of Fine Arts and developed an art philosophy known as the One Dimension; forming an artist collective of the same name. One Dimension referred to the realm between the visible world and that of God, where transcendence results in the disintegration of the self. While familiar with such methods of analysis as Structuralism and Deconstruction, Al Said was particularly influenced by Sufi thought and experimented with ways in which pictorial surfaces could be transcended, often using holes and lacerations in his works.