Born in Diywania in Iraq, he lives and works in Florence and Prato since 1977. He graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.
He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Iraq and various European cities.
After years of using oil paint he moved on to black and white watercolor and videos. This course of his painting has a strong stylistic and conceptual coherence: the theme that unites all his works lies in the interpretative variety of the visible world.
As well as an artist, Al Kafaji is a political and intellectual activist who is forcibly far from his homeland. With a very refined gaze and perception he was able to translate the irreducibility of the world into easy and simple compositional schemes into poetic forms.
The recurring subjects, whose profile is chosen for this elaboration, are vegetal and animal forms always in some way attributable to archetypal elements of Islamic or adopted Tuscan culture. Belonging to the artist’s imagination, divided between memory of the past, the link with Islamic culture, the events of its inhabitants, refugees, exiles, and the tradition of Tuscany, the new adopted land, with its iconic history.