THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS is very pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Iraqi-American artist Ahmed Alsoudani. This exhibition of mostly large-scale drawings composes spoil and decay in mass. The works suggest political violence, terror, torture, and war without actually depicting the hand of power inflicting the damage. This framing is specific to the media's presentation of shock and awe tactics – severing the identity of the inflictor from the pain of the victim, fostering public sympathy with aloofness to government policy. The drawings on view are deeply affected by the distribution of such images.

Alsoudani’s work alludes to Goya’s Disasters of War and Picasso’s Guernica while borrowing from the gestures of Willem de Kooning and the figuration of Francis Bacon. His drawings portray scenes of damnation without God and war without battle speaking most of all to the universal condition of suffering. All of which, Alsoudani expresses through Western traditions and tools in a distinct calligraphic notation and burnt out rendering to compose varied situations of violent waste. While flesh hangs off contorted figures, they do not ask for sympathy or beg for mercy, these are figures inured in an accumulation of pain and exhaustion.




Ahmed Alsoudani was born in Baghdad, 1975. He holds a BFA in painting from the Maine College of Art in Portland, and he is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. His work has been exhibited in The Atrocity Exhibition at THIERRY GOLDBERG PROJECTS; at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; The Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju, South Korea; and at Filament Gallery, Portland, Maine.