Ahmed Alsoudani

Pablo Picasso Willem de Kooning Francis Bacon George Grosz J Goya Peter Halley Picasso Specialist Dies at 84 With Airier Aisles, the Palm Beach Art Fair Scores

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Ahmed Alsoudani is a wanted man. Dealers and collectors have beaten a well-worn path between New York and the Iraqi-born artist’s studio door on Church Street in New Haven ever since he graduated among 21 MFA students at the Yale University School of Art last June. Now he is moving to Berlin (the new Williamsburg). Shipping shouldn’t cost much: Aside from a few works he has kept for himself, he has sold out his stock in New York shows, the larger paintings commanding up 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 been discussing a work they refer to by its nickname, The General or The Dictator, because the artist, maddeningly, calls everything Untitled. Alsoudani looks scholarly until a smile gives his face a slightly devilish cast. He turned 34 in October and is proud of his success, if a little puzzled by it—“Why me?” But he knows what he wants to become and how to get there: “I believe painting is 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 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. Other painters he brings to mind are Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning and George Grosz—Bacon for his grotesque portrayal of anomie in modern life, de Kooning for his gestural fluency and Grosz for the complex iconography and social commentary of his canvases. 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 immediately that he’s authentic. He’s making art about a real subject, not generalized angst and not about navel-gazing in the art world.”

Alsoudani has little time for any kind of gazing these days, as he prepares for his move abroad. Only one painting in his disheveled New Haven studio is unfinished: a huge—24 by 12 foot—battle scene in acrylics along the lines of Poussin’s Rape of the Sabine Women. Some figures are half completed, and some areas drawn in, while others are fully painted. Large, vividly colored canvases like 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 liked my line quality [in the drawings], so they started pushing me to put the two together. After my first solo show in New York [in September 2007], I started to do what I had always been doing. After an hour, I took the paper down and began to work on a canvas, putting painting and drawing together for the first time.”

Most of Alsoudani’s drawings were in charcoal with dabs of pastel or acrylic color. “I was afraid at first to use a lot of color, but then I thought, ‘I’m just a student here, I can do whatever I want, and at the end of the day, it’s just student work.’ That helped me a lot. Now I start with lines and then bury them and let the color be in charge.”

Alsoudani moved from oil to acrylic because he can apply it as a wash on his canvases, which he doesn’t prime. “It dries quickly,” he explains, “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, but the 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 rebuilding on it. For me it’s a joyful experience.”