Iraqi-American painter Ahmed Alsoudani fled Baghdad during the first Gulf War (when he was 20) and lived as a refugee in Syria before being granted asylum in the US. Since then, he’s pursued an American life in art. Soon after earning a BFA from the Maine College of Art and an MFA from Yale, his destructive looking charcoal-mixed-with-paint paintings have been seen at London’s Saatchi Gallery and Venice Biennale. This year, he’s having his first major museum show “Ahmed Alsoudani: Redacted” at the Phoenix Art Museum (March 13-July 7, 2013). Twenty-one paintings (created since 2010) are on view.
Alsoudani cites artists Goya and George Grosz “whose work has become the lasting consciousness of the atrocities of the 19th and 20th centuries” as inspiration, as well as his own experiences as a child born in Baghdad in 1975.