The idea began with a gesture seen in newspapers across the world.

It was 2003 and Esam Pasha, an Iraqi painter and translator for coalition forces and journalists in Baghdad, stood before a giant mural of Saddam Hussein and started painting it over with his own colorful, surreal work of art. After spending a month, working bit by bit, he finished his 17-foot-by-12-foot mural – the first reclamation of public space for the people of Iraq after the fall of Saddam. During the long days, he didn’t use a single drop of black paint, he said. “I felt Baghdad had more than its share of black.”

The story struck Peter Hastings Falk, an author and independent curator who works in Connecticut and New York City. Immediately he tried to get in touch with Mr. Pasha – and found his e-mail address on the Internet. “We started an e-mail relationship,” Mr. Falk said. “And during that time, what unfolded was my interest in the art scene in Baghdad.”

From that epistolary friendship, the first exhibition of modern Iraqi art in a New York gallery was born. Mr. Pasha helped Mr. Falk get in touch with about 60 of the leading artists in Baghdad, 12 of whom have been included in “Ashes to Art: The Iraqi Phoenix,” which opened its second installment Tuesday night at the Pomegranate Gallery in SoHo.

Mr. Pasha, with his heavy beard and soft eyes, was in his studio as the bombs rained down in 2003. He painted with melted crayons because no acrylic or paint was available. His series of paintings is called “Tears of Wax.” Mr. Falk talked ecstatically about the artist and his work, quickly boasting that Mr. Pasha speaks five languages and was nearly killed four times.

“He hardly slept,” Mr. Falk said. While working as a translator for the Army and Western journalists, as well as training the new generation of Iraqi police officers, on most nights Mr. Pasha had only a few hours to himself.

At least one of Mr. Pasha’s fellow artists fled to Jordan during the war, and the others were continuing their work in the background of the war and ensuing occupation, mourning the looting of the National Library of Iraq, the bombing of an important art library, and the deaths of thousands of civilians. Much of their country, which was once an epicenter for fine arts and culture in the Middle East, was in shambles.

But their work is not a forthright criticism of life in a fractured country. They are the heirs to a tradition of abstract painting dating to the first half of the 20th century, when a generation of European-trained Iraqi artists known as the “Pioneers” were creating and teaching art in Baghdad. The artists on display at the Pomegranate Gallery paint their emotions with the textures and colors of their environment – often using found material as their canvases, including torn notebooks, palm fronds, and abandoned pieces of thick board. They employ the colors of the desert and rusted metal: rich ochres, deep blues, and magentas.

“The war is an unavoidable element in their works, however subtly it appears,” Mr. Falk said.

Researching the ancestry of the modern art movement in Baghdad, Messrs. Falk and Pasha were led to an art historian at the University of North Texas, Nada Shabout, who had curated an exhibit of contemporary Iraqi art at the college in October 2005.On hearing their idea for an exhibit, she told them there was a man they would have to meet, Oded Halahmy, who was breaking ground with his Pomegranate Gallery, devoted to bringing Middle Eastern art to America.

Messrs. Falk and Halahmy met and immediately discovered a shared vision that art could help two worlds – one ravaged by war and another full of damaging stereotypes about the Middle East – overcome their skewed ideas about each other.

For Mr. Falk, the New York show is just the start. He is planning to take the work on a tour of college campuses across the country, and to set up more group and one-man shows at the Pomegranate Gallery.

“Art can serve as one of the best cultural ambassadors to other cultures,” he said.

“This can create a dialogue between two countries,” Mr. Halahmy said, insisting with a smile: “We have something besides oil in Iraq – we have oil paintings.”

Baghdad has a small but vibrant art scene with painters, sculptors, musicians, and poets, Mr. Pasha said. One of the about 20 galleries they would go to is called Hewar, which means “dialogue” in Arabic, where they would discuss art and drink tea. Qasim Sabti, whose art is in the Phoenix show, is the owner of Hewar and is using the proceeds from any sales in New York to expand and re furbish it.

Mr. Halahmy’s own space is based on this philosophy of galleries. The Pomegranate Gallery, on Greene Street, which is his former studio from when he first moved to New York 35 years ago, features music and a cafe that offers light food and coffee. You are meant to stay a while, take your time, let the art sink in, he said.

The style of his sculptures, placed in corners of the room, is a blend of Middle Eastern imagery with abstract shapes, a look he has developed during a storied life in three countries. He left Iraq as a child with his family in 1951 for Israel. Eventually they made their way to Tel Aviv and Yaffa, where he spent his adolescence. A precocious young man with a clear talent for art, Mr. Halahmy was accepted to St. Martin’s College in London, where he studied sculpture with Henry Moore. Turning down a job to be Moore’s assistant, Mr. Halahmy took a teaching position at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto, and then at Cooper Union and New York University. It was after discussions with Andy Warhol and other artists that he began adding icons and popular images from the Middle East to his art. “I looked deep in my childhood to find the beautiful things from my country,” he said.

The pomegranate and the palm tree are featured in many of his pieces, which range from large outdoor sculptures to his handcrafted kitchen utensils. In 2004, he designed a menorah for the U.S. Army to be placed in Saddam’s throne room – a story that he bats away as unimportant. He shuns straightforward politics when it comes to Iraq. “Everyone has their own opinions on the Middle East,” he said. “The work from these artists is more important.”

The art from the exhibit is equally oblique about current events, as if emotion overwhelms a straightforward discussion of life under Saddam and the war.

A particularly striking piece is Hayder Ali’s “Dafatir,” an artist’s notebook torn and shaded with charcoal and a single scar of bright red. The book, held up by a frayed piece of rope, almost looks like a gritty topographical map or a set of weathered shingles. In his artist’s statement, Mr. Ali writes, “My books are witnesses to a period of catastrophe that has driven nails into the body of our culture and our civilization’s achievements.”

Beside the rubble of bombed-out buildings, artists in Baghdad are continuing to create their art, rising out of a new era of uncertainty and devastation – hence the name of the exhibit. Yet this show represents just a fraction of the work being done – work that will continue to be appreciated for years to come, Mr. Falk said.

“Baghdad has a history of being the nexus of fine arts and culture in the Middle East,” he said. “This is a small chapter in the history of art, but an important one.”

Until March 28 (133 Greene Street, between Prince and Houston Streets, 212-260-4014).