Ahmed Alsoudani

Ahmed Alsoudani is a wanted man. Dealers and collectorshave beaten a well-worn path between New York and theIraqi-born artist’s studio door on Church Street in New Havenever since he graduated among 21 MFA students at the YaleUniversity School of Art last June. Now he is moving to Berlin(the new Williamsburg). Shipping shouldn’t cost much: Asidefrom a few works he has kept for himself, he has sold out hisstock in New York shows, the larger paintings commandingup to $30,000, according to his dealer, Robert Goff, of Goff &Rosenthal in New York’s Chelsea district.

“Now maybe I will be able to just concentrate on painting,”Alsoudani tells a visitor to his studio, with whom he has beendiscussing a work they refer to by its nickname, The General orThe Dictator, because the artist, maddeningly, calls everythingUntitled. Alsoudani looks scholarly until a smile gives his facea slightly devilish cast. He turned 34 in October and is proudof his success, if a little puzzled by it—“Why me?” But he knowswhat he wants to become and how to get there: “I believe paintingis a marathon. I don’t go out a lot. I work and work and work.It’s really all I do.”

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 comparedto Goyas Disasters of War and Picassos Guernica. Like those twoartists, he can convey a kind of awful beautyin horror; he has a talent for the terrible.Other painters he brings to mind are FrancisBacon, Willem de Kooning and GeorgeGroszBacon for his grotesque portrayalof anomie in modern life, de Kooning for hisgestural fluency and Grosz for the complexiconography and social commentary of hiscanvases. In contrast with Grosz, however,Alsoudani doesn’t trade in open satire.

“It’s clear that Ahmed has a remarkable ability to synthesize,”says Goff. “Yet he is in no way a copyist. People see immediatelythat he’s authentic. He’s making art about a real subject, not generalizedangst and not about navel-gazing in the art world.”

Alsoudani has little time for any kind of gazing these days, ashe prepares for his move abroad. Only one painting in his disheveledNew Haven studio is unfinished: a huge—24 by 12 foot—battlescene in acrylics along the lines of Poussins Rape of the SabineWomen. Some figures are half completed, and some areas drawnin, while others are fully painted. Large, vividly colored canvaseslike this represent an artistic evolution from Alsoudani’s earlier,nearly monochromatic drawings on paper.

“I paint differently from the way I draw,” he says. “The[Yale] faculty was interested in my color palette, and they likedmy line quality [in the drawings], so theystarted pushing me to put the two together.After my first solo show in New York [inSeptember 2007], I started to do what I hadalways been doing. After an hour, I took thepaper down and began to work on a canvas,putting painting and drawing together forthe first time.”

Most of Alsoudani’s drawings werein charcoal with dabs of pastel or acryliccolor. “I was afraid at first to use a lot ofcolor, but then I thought, ‘I’m just a studenthere, I can do whatever I want, and at theend of the day, it’s just student work.’ Thathelped me a lot. Now I start with lines andthen bury them and let thecolor be in charge.”

Alsoudani movedfrom oil to acrylic becausehe can apply it as a wash on his canvases, which he doesn’t prime. “It dries quickly,” heexplains, “and I can correct it with gesso, which I also use as a color.It’s the reverse of the way most painters work.” He sketches, butthe final painting is often entirely different from his first plan for it.“I do start with an idea in my mind but keep building and rebuildingon it. For me it’s a joyful experience.”

The paintings employ motifs such as eyeballs, railings andamoebalike patches that resemble spotted fabric, but the imagesconnote different things in different contexts. The spots, for example,may effect a change of tone in a work, or they may representblood corpuscles exposed by flayed skin. “I really do think a paintingneeds to have more than one meaning,” he says. “I want peopleto look and find different stories.”

People seem to respond to the stories they discover in thepictures, particularly Alsoudani’s vivid and immediate depictionsof the Iraq war, portrayals of which many think have been greatlysanitized in the West. Not surprisingly, several of his collectorsare Middle Eastern: Charles Saatchi, who was born in Iraq, hastwo drawings and three paintings. The Iranian Ebrahim Melamed,founder of the Honart Museum, which is opening in Tehran thisyear, owns two paintings, as do Hala and Issam M. Fares, ofLebanon. And Sheikha Paula al-Sabah, a senior member of theKuwaiti royal family who is one of the biggest and most importantcollectors of contemporary art in the Middle East, is first in line forthe next Alsoudani up for sale.

Closer to home, Sherri Grace, a Long Island collectorwho was an early Alsoudani fan, owns six drawings and onepainting—she could have had a second,but she dithered, and Saatchi, who seemsto have eyes in all the world’s art centers,grabbed the oil, Untitled, 2007. It wasGrace who put Goff on to Alsoudani.“I told him I had just discovered ayoung artist who is going to be the nextPicasso,” she recalls. The dealer quicklydid some Web research, liked what he saw and headed to Yale.

Horatio Alger might have written Alsoudani’s life story—ifAlger had been from Baghdad. Born in that city in 1975 and one ofsix children, Alsoudani left home in 1995, after the first Gulf War,and took up illegal residence in Damascus, where he joined a communityof writers, artists and intellectuals. Having always excelledat drawing in school, he went back to making art while looking fora way to get out of Syria, a process that took four years.

In 1998 he was in a group show at Damascus’s SheratonHotel, where an American couple saw his work and told him heshould study art, suggesting that he apply to the United Nationsfor asylum. After an intricate dance of applications and interviews,Alsoudani landed in Washington, D.C., with a green card and nota word of English. He studied the language when not working as adishwasher. At the invitation of an Iraqi family he knew, he movedto Portland, Maine, and had just started at the Maine College of Art (MECA) when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, occurred.As world events developed, he turned to depictions of war.

After attending the prestigious Yale School of Music and Artsummer program in Norfolk, Connecticut, in 2004 and graduatingfrom MECA in 2005, Alsoudanishowed two drawings at theFilament Gallery, in Portland. Aninterview in the local newspaper,which described the worksas “wild, disjointed images thatsuggest chaos and confusion,” contained this prescient insight: “Ahmed Alsoudani may well be astar in the making.” A few days later, on June 9, 2006, he becamea U.S. citizen and went off to spend the summer at the SkowheganSchool of Painting and Sculpture, in Maine, heading from there toYale. At both programs, he joined an elite group of artists.

Alsoudani and Yale fit together like bread and butter. Heloved the other students, the faculty, the weekly “pit crits” (criticalsessions) and the opportunity to pore over Goya’s Disasters ofWar at the Yale Art Gallery library. He also basked in the studiovisits by the painter-critics Peter Halley and Robert Storrthedirector of graduate painting and printmaking and the dean of theart school, respectively.

Alsoudani came to the attention of New York talent scoutsin 2007 at the open studio held every May at Yale, as at mostart schools. Among the impressed observers was Ron Segev, theowner and director of Thierry Goldberg Projects, on RivingtonStreet in Manhattan, who regularly visits all the New York–areaart schools. At the end of June, Projects put two of Alsoudani’slarge (9 by 7 foot) drawings into a groupshow, “The Atrocity Exhibition,” and inSeptember it mounted a solo display of sixof his drawings. Both attracted considerablemedia attention. “We kind of launchedhis career,” says Segev.

Also attending the Yale studio showwas Simon Watson. The adviser, widely known for his passionfor and deep knowledge of contemporary art, had heard aboutAlsoudani even earlier from a Yale alum who collects the school’sartists. “Ahmed’s work has a beautiful cadence between drawingand painting,” Watson says. “It’s a reverie about exile.”

Lital Mehr, of the Mehr Gallery in Chelsea, also made thetrip to New Haven. “She offered me a group show, then a two-personshow in January 2008, and I said OK,” Alsoudani recalls.“She was very persistent.” News of his work soon reached DaveHunt, the independent curator, critic and indefatigable new-arttracker, who says he “looks for people with incredible potential,those who will do great things. Ahmed has the most tremendouspotential of all of them.” Hunt visited Alsoudani at Yale with SimaFamilant, another art adviser, who knew about the artist from theProjects and Mehr shows and bought two paintings for a client.

These early successes created a buzz that has generatedmore exhibitions, both at home and abroad, including the upcominggroup show “Caught in the Middle,” which will travel fromthe Asia Contemporary Art Fair in NewYork in November to Art Basel Miami inDecember. It has also led to a hardcovermonograph, to be published by Hatje Cantznext year, and to his current berth at Goff& Rosenthal, which is sponsoring his moveto Berlin, where it has a branch.

Walking his visitor out of his studio,Alsoudani says, “I don’t reallyneed much to live on, just alittle apartment and a placeto work.” Then, following anelaborately polite farewell, heturns and strides briskly away,looking a lot like a young mangoing places.