Ahmed Alsoudani - Contemporary Art Day Sale London Thursday, February 12, 2015 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection

  • Catalogue Essay

    Iraqi-born Ahmed Alsoudani fled his home country during the first Gulf War, eventually claiming asylum in the United States. Taking his childhood experiences of war as inspiration, Alsoudani explores the subject of, and his concern with, contemporary conflict. A graduate of the prestigious Yale MFA program, Alsoudani represented Iraq in the 2013 Venice Biennale and has had solo shows in London, Los Angeles, New York and Berlin.

    Following in the tradition of Francisco Goya, Georges Grosz and Francis Bacon, Alsoudani’s figures and scenes appear in transition and are full of anguish, agony and chaos. Grotesque and twisted bodies are depicted in scenes of carnage and devastation exaggerated through the artist’s use of charcoal. The mixing and layering of charcoal and acrylic on canvas, as seen in the present lot, further exemplify the desolation and destruction of the horrors of war as it is viewed through a soot-covered lens. This turbulent aesthetic allows Alsoudani to focus on the aspects of human suffering: both the physical, through deformed and distorted figures, and the psychological, through a stylistic composition of raw and fragmented gestures.

    "I'm interested in both memory and history and in those potent areas between the two that enable me to keep memories alive in the present." Ahmed Alsoudani

156

Untitled

2010
acrylic, charcoal on canvas
155 x 132 cm (61 x 51 7/8 in.)

Estimate
£70,000 - 90,000 

Contact Specialist
Henry Highley
Head of Sale
hhighley@phillips.com
+ 44 20 7318 4061

Contemporary Art Day Sale

London Auction 13 February 2015 2pm