Hannibal Alkhas was an Assyrian artist who worked with such media as painting, sculpture and books. His paintings were made in a figurative art style.
Background
Hannibal Alkhas was born on June 16, 1930, in Kermanshah city, Islamic Republic of Iran. He was a son of Addai Alkhas, a famous Assyrian writer who founded Assyrian literary magazine called Gilgamesh.
Among the notable relatives of the painter are his uncle, John Alkhas, an Assyrian poet and his brother, a moviemaker Marduk Alkhas.
Hannibal Alkhas was raised in Kermanshah, Ahwaz and Tehran.
Education
Hannibal Alkhas received his first drawing lessons as a child in Iran.
At the age of twenty-one, Alkhas moved to the United States in order to pursue his education at the Loyola University of Chicago, Illinois where he had studied philosophy for three years.
In 1953, to continue his artistic training, Hannibal entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago which he had attended till 1958. At the institution, the Hannibal Alkhas received his Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees.
Career
Hannibal Alkhas became a professor at the Tehran School of Fine Arts in 1959 after his father’s death. At the institution, the artist taught painting, drawing, and art history for four years. While at the School, he also founded an art gallery called Gilgamesh which gathered young and talented Iranian artists.
In 1963, Alkhas returned to the United States and occupied a teaching position at the Monticello College in Illinois. Later, he became its chairman of the art department. This American stint had lasted six years.
After, Hannibal Alkhas came back again to his native Iran. There, he began to teach at the Tehran University and had held this post for the following eleven years.
In 1992, the artist gained one more teaching post, the one at the Islamic Azad University in Iran. Despite his teaching activity at the universities, he also gave private lessons and contributed to the different Iranian periodicals.
Besides, Hannibal Alkhas illustrated a lot of books, wrote many poems in Assyrian as well as translated a huge number of writings into the language and from it. Alkhas’s own writings in Assyrian appeared only when he was forty. Among his brilliant examples in this field are the translation from Persian of one his poems named White Friend, Black Friend and the famous popular tale by a Russian poet Alexander Pushkin called The Fisherman and the Gold Fish translated by the artist into Assyrian.
Hannibal Alkhas also transmitted his art knowledge at the Assyrian Civic Club of Turluck and the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles.