Ahmed Alsoudani

Goff & Rosenthal, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2009

London, Saatchi Gallery, Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East,  2009, no. 17, illustrated in colour

Robert Goff and Cassie Rosenthal, Ahmed Alsoudani, Ostfildern 2009, p. 77, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the blue is more turquoise in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The right and left edges are deckled. There are artist's pinholes along each edge. There is a slight undulation to the paper inherent to the size of the sheet.
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Possessed of a restless, violently protean energy, the present work epitomises Ahmed Alsoudani's masterful abstraction of dynamic figures, wrought to capture the harsh reality of war. Unsurpassed among his works on paper, its painterly energy belies the intricate, architectural construction of the composition. The eye dances over chaotic forms, finding reward in a hidden human face or the amphibious texture of a frog, the gills of a catfish or an arrestingly saturated colour. This narrative strength and emphasis on close viewing marks the present work as a superlative example of Alsoudani's obsessive engagement with the Iraq war. Born in Baghdad in 1975, he fled to Syria at twenty after committing a youthful act of anti-government graffiti, harshly punishable by Saddam Hussein's repressive establishment. While Alsoudani has never returned to Iraq, his family remains along with a sense of personal ownership and belonging. At once an elegy to corporeal and spiritual suffering and a visualisation of the difficulties engendered by viewing and knowing only from afar, the present work is one of Alsoudani's most important and paradigmatic achievements.

The transformational physics of the present work, which unites disparate forms and objects into a single writhing, flinging mass, evokes Proteus, the iconic sea god from The Odyssey who will "twist and turn into every beast that moves across the earth, transforming himself into water, superhuman fire" to escape divulging the secrets of his magical foresight (Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by: Robert Fitzgerald, Garden City 1961, lines 460-80). His shape-shifting visually embodies the ephemerality of his value as truth-teller and offers an apt metaphor for Alsoudani's own tenuous access to events in Iraq. Filtered across space, time and media biases, Alsoudani receives and processes information about the war on a delay:  "I don't react right away. I address things like the moment when the statue of Saddam fell not at that time but five years later... And I'm not just commenting on Iraq but on the experience that becomes universal" (the artist in: 'Ahmed Alsoudani in Conversation with Robert Goff', in: Robert Goff and Cassie Rosenthal, Eds., Ahmed Alsoudani, Ostfildern 2009, p. 62). In 2011 Alsoudani was one of five artists selected to represent Iraq at the Venice Biennale, crucially the first Iraqi pavilion in thirty-five years.

Influenced by master German Expressionists such as Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Beckmann, Alsoudani's protest is articulated via abstracting and transmuting organic forms. In this respect, Alsoudani is equally the inheritor of Francis Bacon's bodily deformations: "The body is thrown into an abnormal athleticism of spasmodic screaming and writhing. Bacon's figures are often defined by the hysterical, temporary and provisional presence of determinate organs: ones that are polyvalent, aberrant and monstrous" (Darren Ambrose, 'Bacon's Spiritual Realism - The Spirit in the Body' in: Martin Harrison Ed., Francis Bacon: New Studies, Göttingen 2009, p. 40). Flawlessly executed, the present work's colouring suggests combinations witnessed throughout Bacon's oeuvre: a base of dark purples and charcoal greys is punctured by pinkish flesh tones and compellingly saturated reds and blues, as if each hue within a raw, opalescent steak were extracted and reproduced side-by-side. In this manner, Alsoudani and Bacon both address flesh without the sensationalism of blood, calling attention to the materiality of the organic and the energy it encapsulates.

The compelling applications of charcoal, acrylic paint and pastel evinced by the present work attest to Alsoudani's rejection of strict boundaries between media. "One of my biggest aims is to bridge the gap between the process of drawing and the final product of painting" (the artist in: Sarah Schmerler and Ahmed Alsoudani, 'In the Studio', Art in America, June/July 2011, p. 114). His works on canvas are stretched tight "like a drum" specifically to enable meticulously wrought charcoal drawings, which serve as skeletal forms onto which colour may be applied (the artist in: 'Ahmed Alsoudani in Conversation with Robert Goff', in: Robert Goff and Cassie Rosenthal, Eds., Ahmed Alsoudani, Ostfildern 2009, p. 61). The achievement of depth without recourse to strict spatial perspective lends the work a surrealistic quality, recalling the watercolour and line drawing constructions of Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky or Graham Sutherland.

Whereas Graham Sutherland was employed by the British government as a "war artist" charged with documenting industries and landscapes affected by the war effort, Alsoudani insists: "I'm not trying to make 'war paintings,' but paintings about war. I'm interested in depicting the effects of war on people who live under those circumstances" (Ibid,  p. 61). The refusal to be co-opted by any national power and choice to focus on the subjective experience of besieged communities perhaps allies the present work most closely with Picasso's immortal Guernica. A paradigmatic lament for the terror experienced by civilians subject to aerial bombings during the Spanish Civil War, Guernica also incorporates man and beast in a massive and highly moving tableau. The enlarged arm reaching upward from the top right corner of Alsoudani's work, its hand marked by a surplus of thick, rough-hewn digits, vividly recalls the desperate figure gesturing towards the sky in the top right corner of Guernica. Yet while Guernica monochromatically employs a flat, collage-like composition, Alsoudani explodes the scene into a three-dimensional melée. Formal play, immediacy, and a gorgeousness of handling distinguish the present work, which epitomises the height of Alsoudani's astonishing production.