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Lot Essay
'Baghdad II depicts a "typical" Baghdad scene: on the left side of the canvas a car has crashed into an American-built security wall - another suicide bombing attempt or an act of pure desperation. Stylised licks of red flame come up from the ground, an eyeball has rolled to the centre of the painting on the bottom. The eyeball plays a role in terms of content and form but also alludes to Lebanese poet Abbas Baythoon. On the lower right hand side of the painting a head lies behind bars - this is a reference to a statue in Baghdad, which here Alsoudani has decapitated and, ironically, brought to life as an imprisoned figure. One way to read this is that under Saddam's dictatorship art was constricted and imprisoned and this idea of censorship is continually evoked through a layered approach in this work. The female figure in the centre right side of the painting is deliberately drawn in as opposed to painted, a martyr-figure both carrying and giving birth to change'.
Robert Goff.
'Alsoudani's subject is war. Not, he says, a specific war, although Iraq is a clear reference, but all wars, with their death, destruction, dislocation and despair. His work has been compared to Goya's Disasters of War and Picasso's Guernica. Like those two artists, he can convey a kind of awful beauty in horror; he has a talent for the terrible' (A. Grant, 'Ahmed Alsoudani', Art + Auction, November 2008, reproduced at www.artinfo.com).
A tumbling mass of flames, fragments and flesh meticulously painted across the monumental expanse of a vast diptych, Ahmed Alsoudani's Baghdad II is a colossal indictment of war, bemoaning the damage wreaked by conflict everywhere, and in particular in the artist's native Iraq. In this picture, shards of blasted architecture strike out at diagonal angles, providing a solid backdrop to the deliberately chaotic agglomeration of semi-organic forms that dominate the middle-ground, often teetering towards recognition as springs, smoke or entrails, occasionally featuring meat-like colourings that hint at wounds as well as bomb damage. Meanwhile two huge, claw-like fingers of flame emerge from the ground, searing darts of red that animate the entire surface, thrust into bold relief by their contrast with the darker background. Accentuating the painterly treatment that articulates so much of the surface, a spectral figure of a woman is shown drawn in reserve on the exposed primed canvas, the only paint in her body a rich crimson area perhaps indicating her womb, showing her as an indicator of the potential of the future. Sitting either forlorn or concerned, this figure is perched next to an eye-like element which has also cracked open like an egg: they may personify the hope for peace and progress, a timely subject following the Arab Spring that has spread across so much of the region. The combination of lush, even sensual craftsmanship in the lavishly built-up surfaces of pictures such as Baghdad II with his incredible power to evoke disaster have propelled Alsoudani onto the international stage. It was only fitting that last year he was one of a handful of artists selected to exhibit in Wounded Water, the show organised in the Iraq Pavillion at the Venice Biennale - the first time his country had been represented there in 35 years. Alsoudani's most frequent subject is war: living in the United States of America while allied forces invaded Iraq and occupied his former home, Baghdad, he was forced to be a distant witness to the torments that were being rained upon his friends and family back home, watching the news as bombs rained down and tanks rolled in. He has recalled: 'generally I don't show actual battle scenes in which there are soldiers, or fighting weapons. I've been in the unique and painful situation of observing the war and being in the U.S. while my family remains in Baghdad. I'm away physically but I talk to my family very often, so I feel caught in between. This state of being "between" two places and two worlds allows me to see and hear things from a different point of view' (A. Alsoudani quoted in R. Goff, 'Ahmed Alsoudani in Conversation with R. Goff', pp. 59-62, Ahmed Alsoudani, exh. cat., New York, 2009, p. 61).
Pictures such as Baghdad II are the result of Alsoudani's tension, his experience in that 'between' zone. Intriguingly, while war had already appeared in his pictures earlier, it was only after five years that Alsoudani felt able to confront directly his experiences, feelings and thoughts about the invasion itself in pictures such as Baghdad II. Where many of his pictures have tackled the subject of conflict in a more general sense, avoiding any specificity, Baghdad II is one of only a handful of paintings by Alsoudani which has been granted a specific title, another exception being its smaller sister-picture Baghdad I. And yet, it is out of this more intense, more direct experience that Alsoudani has managed to create a masterpiece, a vast panoply filled with virtuoso flights of painterly treatment and with details that speak of his own anxiety. This is evident in the flames, in the torn buildings, in the remains that are scattered across the composition, and indeed in the head of a statue which is shown behind bars at the bottom right, as though the now torn-down colossal images of the former dictator Saddam Hussein had been decapitated and then imprisoned. However, lying on its back, looking up with its mouth open, this gigantic profile head, with the blood-red shown at its neck, appears to be a captive to be pitied - as Robert Goff has explained, it appears as a metaphor for the limited scope for artistic expression in Saddam's Iraq, the sculpture as a martyr to the cause of freedom of speech.
Alsoudani has emerged as an artist able to bring a certain beauty to his images of the horrors of war, continuing a tradition that includes Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso and crucially Francisco de Goya. During his time as a graduate student at Yale, Alsoudani had the chance to look at Goya's Disasters of War, his iconic series of etchings, in the flesh. Some of the sensibility of the clutter of those images is carried into Baghdad II, as is the ambiguity of the mangled bodies that litter his work. However, Alsoudani's work occupies a territory between abstraction and figuration that is filled with allusions, recalling the pictures of Arshile Gorky, another emigré who made his home in the States after escaping from institutionalised violence in his own homeland. Alsoudani's own exertions in creating a surface that allows the viewer to infer so much while avoiding direct representation is all the more epic in Baghdad II, whose two panels stretch almost four metres across. A vast amount of the canvas is filled with elements which have been rendered with an incredible attention to detail. Some of the kaleidoscopic smoke-like areas of colour with their swirls of grey bleeding into each other have been built up with many layers of paint, while the silhouette of the woman remains a ghostly contrast, the lone live figure shown as an ethereal presence within this seething mass of flesh and machinery. This reveals the incredible dedication that Alsoudani shows to his pictures. 'I care very much about the surface of my paintings,' he has explained. 'In some places the paint is ten to twelve layers thick; in other parts the original charcoal drawing may still be there, showing through. My surface is all about the varying thickness or thinness of the paint in different parts of the canvas' (A. Alsoudani, quoted in ibid., p. 61).
Robert Goff.
'Alsoudani's subject is war. Not, he says, a specific war, although Iraq is a clear reference, but all wars, with their death, destruction, dislocation and despair. His work has been compared to Goya's Disasters of War and Picasso's Guernica. Like those two artists, he can convey a kind of awful beauty in horror; he has a talent for the terrible' (A. Grant, 'Ahmed Alsoudani', Art + Auction, November 2008, reproduced at www.artinfo.com).
A tumbling mass of flames, fragments and flesh meticulously painted across the monumental expanse of a vast diptych, Ahmed Alsoudani's Baghdad II is a colossal indictment of war, bemoaning the damage wreaked by conflict everywhere, and in particular in the artist's native Iraq. In this picture, shards of blasted architecture strike out at diagonal angles, providing a solid backdrop to the deliberately chaotic agglomeration of semi-organic forms that dominate the middle-ground, often teetering towards recognition as springs, smoke or entrails, occasionally featuring meat-like colourings that hint at wounds as well as bomb damage. Meanwhile two huge, claw-like fingers of flame emerge from the ground, searing darts of red that animate the entire surface, thrust into bold relief by their contrast with the darker background. Accentuating the painterly treatment that articulates so much of the surface, a spectral figure of a woman is shown drawn in reserve on the exposed primed canvas, the only paint in her body a rich crimson area perhaps indicating her womb, showing her as an indicator of the potential of the future. Sitting either forlorn or concerned, this figure is perched next to an eye-like element which has also cracked open like an egg: they may personify the hope for peace and progress, a timely subject following the Arab Spring that has spread across so much of the region. The combination of lush, even sensual craftsmanship in the lavishly built-up surfaces of pictures such as Baghdad II with his incredible power to evoke disaster have propelled Alsoudani onto the international stage. It was only fitting that last year he was one of a handful of artists selected to exhibit in Wounded Water, the show organised in the Iraq Pavillion at the Venice Biennale - the first time his country had been represented there in 35 years. Alsoudani's most frequent subject is war: living in the United States of America while allied forces invaded Iraq and occupied his former home, Baghdad, he was forced to be a distant witness to the torments that were being rained upon his friends and family back home, watching the news as bombs rained down and tanks rolled in. He has recalled: 'generally I don't show actual battle scenes in which there are soldiers, or fighting weapons. I've been in the unique and painful situation of observing the war and being in the U.S. while my family remains in Baghdad. I'm away physically but I talk to my family very often, so I feel caught in between. This state of being "between" two places and two worlds allows me to see and hear things from a different point of view' (A. Alsoudani quoted in R. Goff, 'Ahmed Alsoudani in Conversation with R. Goff', pp. 59-62, Ahmed Alsoudani, exh. cat., New York, 2009, p. 61).
Pictures such as Baghdad II are the result of Alsoudani's tension, his experience in that 'between' zone. Intriguingly, while war had already appeared in his pictures earlier, it was only after five years that Alsoudani felt able to confront directly his experiences, feelings and thoughts about the invasion itself in pictures such as Baghdad II. Where many of his pictures have tackled the subject of conflict in a more general sense, avoiding any specificity, Baghdad II is one of only a handful of paintings by Alsoudani which has been granted a specific title, another exception being its smaller sister-picture Baghdad I. And yet, it is out of this more intense, more direct experience that Alsoudani has managed to create a masterpiece, a vast panoply filled with virtuoso flights of painterly treatment and with details that speak of his own anxiety. This is evident in the flames, in the torn buildings, in the remains that are scattered across the composition, and indeed in the head of a statue which is shown behind bars at the bottom right, as though the now torn-down colossal images of the former dictator Saddam Hussein had been decapitated and then imprisoned. However, lying on its back, looking up with its mouth open, this gigantic profile head, with the blood-red shown at its neck, appears to be a captive to be pitied - as Robert Goff has explained, it appears as a metaphor for the limited scope for artistic expression in Saddam's Iraq, the sculpture as a martyr to the cause of freedom of speech.
Alsoudani has emerged as an artist able to bring a certain beauty to his images of the horrors of war, continuing a tradition that includes Nicolas Poussin, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso and crucially Francisco de Goya. During his time as a graduate student at Yale, Alsoudani had the chance to look at Goya's Disasters of War, his iconic series of etchings, in the flesh. Some of the sensibility of the clutter of those images is carried into Baghdad II, as is the ambiguity of the mangled bodies that litter his work. However, Alsoudani's work occupies a territory between abstraction and figuration that is filled with allusions, recalling the pictures of Arshile Gorky, another emigré who made his home in the States after escaping from institutionalised violence in his own homeland. Alsoudani's own exertions in creating a surface that allows the viewer to infer so much while avoiding direct representation is all the more epic in Baghdad II, whose two panels stretch almost four metres across. A vast amount of the canvas is filled with elements which have been rendered with an incredible attention to detail. Some of the kaleidoscopic smoke-like areas of colour with their swirls of grey bleeding into each other have been built up with many layers of paint, while the silhouette of the woman remains a ghostly contrast, the lone live figure shown as an ethereal presence within this seething mass of flesh and machinery. This reveals the incredible dedication that Alsoudani shows to his pictures. 'I care very much about the surface of my paintings,' he has explained. 'In some places the paint is ten to twelve layers thick; in other parts the original charcoal drawing may still be there, showing through. My surface is all about the varying thickness or thinness of the paint in different parts of the canvas' (A. Alsoudani, quoted in ibid., p. 61).