Fleeing Baghdad in 1991—under fear of reprisal for defacing a mural of Saddam Hussein—16-year-old Ahmed Alsoudani landed in Damascus, Syria, eventually obtaining asylum in the United States. Once here, he set out on a path of art studies that led to an M.F.A. from Yale. For the past five years, Alsoudani has been exhibiting on the international scene, deftly combining acrylic and charcoal on canvas to create exquisite, abstracted narratives of chaos
and violence.
Each of the eight untitled paintings in his first solo show at Haunch of Venison depicts accumulations of biomorphic forms, though the pieces differ with respect to content and art-historical references. The largest, measuring 6 by 15 feet, pictures an American bison—expressionistically rendered with elements taken from other creatures—charging across an impoverished Iraqi landscape. The overall composition evokes Picasso’s Guernica, while the beast itself recalls Bacon’s distorted figures. Meanwhile, a setting consisting of a ramshackle hut, chained-off yard and empty box brings De Chirico’s metaphysical vistas to mind.
In a tall, vertical canvas, an Iraqi officer is portrayed as a grotesque monster, his uniform sloughing off his decaying body, while a pair of related, rectangular paintings—one grounded in red, the other in blue—conveys the frightening consequences of conflict through depictions of ordinary families being displaced or car-bombed. Visually compelling and psychologically disturbing, Alsoudani’s explosive canvases captivate both the eye and the mind with their arguments against war and aggression.—Paul Laster