Middle Eastern Artist
The Middle East has an enormously rich visual art history, from centuries of calligraphy and geometric pattern work to a fast growing contemporary art scene across cities like Beirut, Dubai, and Amman. This section brings together painters, sculptors, and photographers from across the region, with countries that have enough artists on WooArts getting their own dedicated page, while smaller national scenes are gathered here under one regional home. Themes of identity, history, and place run through much of the work here, shaped by a region with a long and complicated story. Explore this section to see the range of art coming out of the Middle East today.
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Aydın Büyüktaş | Middle Eastern Artist
Aydın Büyüktaş is a Turkish photographer who bends familiar streets and rooftops into impossible, folded landscapes. Drawing on years in visual effects and 3D animation, his Flatland series turns ordinary cities into playful, dreamlike maps.
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Rukiye Garip | Middle Eastern Artist
Rukiye Garip is a contemporary Turkish artist based in Istanbul who blends traditional Turkish motifs, calligraphy, and folklore with modern painting and collage. Her work explores identity and cultural heritage through vibrant color and careful, meticulous detail.
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Jean Hanna | Middle Eastern Artist
Jean Hanna is a Syrian artist born in Kamchli in 1981 who studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in both Damascus and Aleppo. Alongside years of work in animation, graphic design, and teaching visual communication, he built a body of solemn, emotionally intense portraits, most often in crayon on canvas, and has shown his…
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Sena Runa | Middle Eastern Artist
Sena Runa is a Turkish paper quilling artist born in Istanbul in 1983, who discovered the craft online in 2013 and left her career in human resources in 2015 to pursue it full time. Her vibrant, joyful designs, rolled and shaped from simple strips of colored paper, led to her first tutorial book, published in…
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Hassan Mahdi | Middle Eastern Artist
Hassan Mahdi is an Iraqi painter with a degree in Plastic Arts who works in watercolor, acrylic and pastel, though watercolor remains his favorite. His paintings capture the softness of everyday Iraqi life: old streets, markets, folklore and warm earthy tones that reflect the land itself. He has exhibited both inside Iraq and abroad, using…
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Kinan Echtay | Middle Eastern Artist
Kinan Echtay is a Syrian photographer known for calm, sharp nature photography, especially crisp, detailed shots of birds in motion. He travels widely to capture scenes shaped by patience, waiting for the right moment rather than forcing it, giving his images a quiet, almost poetic feel.
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Güler Kumru | Middle Eastern Artist
Güler Kumru is a Turkish French portrait painter based near Annecy, France, known for realistic portraits made from photos in pencil, charcoal, pastel, acrylic or watercolor. Drawing on a personal journey from Anatolia to Savoy and the shores of the Bosphorus, she creates custom portraits meant to preserve the faces and moments that matter most…
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Khairy Adam | Middle Eastern Artist
Khairy Adam is a Kurdish painter born in southern Kurdistan in 1981, trained at the Institute of Fine Arts in Duhok and Salahaddin University in Erbil before earning a Master’s in contemporary realism from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. His work centers on Kurdish women in traditional costume, using color, pattern and…
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Ali Ne’ma | Middle Eastern Artist
Ali Ne’ma is an Iraqi realist painter known for vibrant depictions of everyday Baghdadi life, from street vendors and horses to faces drawn from folklore and memory. The youngest of three painting brothers alongside Riad and Tahsin Ne’ma, he was influenced by Iraqi pioneers like Fayek Hassan and the country’s early realist movement. His paintings…
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Sami Kutlular | Middle Eastern Artist
Sami Kutlular (1945 to 2022) was a Turkish painter born in Ankara in 1945, who studied journalism at Ankara Gazi University before turning to hyperrealist painting seriously after retirement. His first solo show, Icons, at the Çankaya Municipality Contemporary Arts Center featured portraits inspired by films like The Big Lebowski and Fight Club, built layer…
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Mahmoud Fahmi | Middle Eastern Artist
Mahmoud Fahmi is an Iraqi painter, born in 1962 in Hillah, Babylon, who earned his MFA from the Kharkov Fine Art Institute in Ukraine in 1997. His vividly colored paintings tell stories from everyday Iraqi life through objects like watermelons, old bicycles and kites, giving his work a narrative style distinct from other artists in…
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Atanur Dogan | Middle Eastern Artist
Atanur and Asuman Dogan are Turkish-Canadian watercolorists who met in 1983 studying fine arts in Izmir and later moved to Vancouver in 1993, drawing much of their work from Anatolian village life and Turkish customs. Atanur paints ordinary people and elderly figures, while Asuman works in a looser, semi-expressionist style capturing landscapes and still lifes.…
