| Maker(s): | Alsoudani, Ahmed
| | Culture: | American, born in Iraq (1975-)
| | Title: | Untitled
| | Date Made: | 2008
| | Type: | Print
| | Materials: | Hardground etching with aquatint, spit bite aquatint, drypoint, roulette and scraping and burnishing on Somerset satin, white paper
| | Place Made: | North America; United States; New Hampshire
| | Measurements: | sheet: 27 x 30.5"; plate: 22 x 24"
| | Accession Number: | AC 2009.24
| | Credit Line: | Purchase with Funds donated by H. Nichols B. Clark in memory of Trinkett Clark
| | Museum Collection: | Mead Art Museum at Amherst College
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Description:
Published by Wingate Studio
Label Text:
In this print, painter and printmaker Ahmed Alsoudani composes a portrait threaded by tubular and bandage-like shapes. Their flailing ends suggest an overwhelming tension that has broken, bursting through the surface of the face. The pieces have shifted to reveal a dark void in the upper half of the face, while the lower half has disintegrated into a mouthless assemblage of red shapes that resemble raw flesh. Sheer blacks and reds discolor the peach-toned surface, which appears bruised and rotting. The decomposing face starkly contrasts with the vivid and multiplying eyeballs. The two largest eyes gaze downward, transfixed by some horror below, while the smaller eyes frantically witness the surrounding events. Like much of Alsoudani's work, this print confronts the viewer with violence and the human cost of war.
Written by Sylvia Li, Class of 2014
Ahmed Alsoudani’s Untitled is characterized, somewhat disturbingly, by fluidly layered and intertwined amorphous forms. Rendered in blue, red, orange, and white (and shades thereof), these shapes appear both to float above and to be embedded within a flesh-colored ground, a state of perpetual indeterminacy that links Untitled to nearby works of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray. Employing an ambitious combination of print techniques, Alsoudani created a composition marked by distinct physicality, a quality that also distinguishes his large-scale paintings. The tan, vaguely oblong ground and recurring eye-like ovals (plus the tuft of hair at the left side) ultimately suggest a human head, one seemingly torn apart. Such evocations of violence owe much to Alsoudani’s response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the United States’ subsequent invasion of his native Iraq, where he lived until 1995.
Written by Katherine Eisen, Class of 2012
Tags:
abstract; figures; portraits; eye; shape; patterns; supernatural; dreams Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=AC+2009.24 |
