Ahmed Alsoudani
14 October - 26 November 2011
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| © Ahmed Alsoudani
Untitled, 2011
Charcoal and acrylic on canvas
157.5 x 248.9 cm |
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AHMED ALSOUDANI
14 October - 26 November, 2011
Haunch of Venison is pleased to present the first solo show in Britain
by acclaimed Iraqi-born artist Ahmed Alsoudani. In this new series of
paintings, Alsoudani continues his complex exploration of war and
conflict, its physical atrocities and psychological consequences.
Featuring deformed, almost bestial, figures twisting in vivid and
surreal landscapes, these tableaux are often laced with a barbed or
morbid humour in the manner of artists such as Francisco Goya and Max
Beckmann among others. Imagery of devastation and violence abounds, with
figures depicted at the moment of a dramatic transition –through fear
or agony – from the human to the grotesque.
The departure point for Alsoudani’s elaborate compositions are energetic
charcoal drawings through which he entwines and intersperses ribbons of
startlingly bright colour, blurring traditional distinctions between
painting and drawing. Alsoudani’s palette recalls the vivid colours
typical of Renaissance altarpieces with their similarly violent, almost
hyperreal depictions of human suffering. While Alsoudani acknowledges
the influence of many artists on his work – from Caravaggio to Carroll
Dunham – he has at the same time developed his own unique pictorial
language, one based on his personal experiences of growing up in Baghdad
under Saddam Hussein’s regime during the first Gulf War and of the more
recent Iraq conflict.
The paintings in this exhibition resist literal readings of warfare,
instead suggesting the inherent chaos of conflict and its dehumanising
effects on humanity. ‘I’m not trying to make ‘war paintings’, Alsoudani
says, ‘but paintings about war. I’m more interested in depicting the
effects of war of the people who live under these circumstances’. Rather
than depicting actual battle scenes, his turbulent compositions seek to
communicate greater emotional truths about the horrors of human
conflict through abstraction, disfiguration and the repetition of
symbolic forms. Despite their joyous colour and effusive activity, the
universality of suffering resonates throughout these pictures: fleshy,
tubelike objects resemble eviscerated organs, tortured limbs splay in
all directions, a single eyeball pops out of a skinless head.
Born in Baghdad in 1975, lives and works in NYC. Ahmed has a BFA from
Maine College Of Art and an MFA from Yale University School Of Art.
Recently, Alsoudani was one of six artists chosen for the inaugural
Iraqi presentation at the 2011 Venice Biennale, and was simultaneously
featured in The World Belongs To You at the Palazzo Grassi and The
Future of a Promise: Contemporary Art from the Arab World (curated by
Lina Lazaar), also in Venice. Other recent group shows include Unveiled:
New Art from the Middle East at the Saatchi Gallery (2009), and
exhibitions at the Arab Museum of Modern Art, the Minneapolis Institute
of Art and Gwangju Musuem of Art. In 2012-13, Alsoudani will mount a
solo exhibition as part of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s MATRIX programme,
followed by a major exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine,
which will tour to the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona.
www.haunchofvenison.com
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