Five works from Janet Rady Fine Art | London Art Fair, January 22-26 2020

Janet Rady Fine Art will be exhibiting ten works by seven artists at the forthcoming London Art Fair which takes place at the Business Design Centre, Islington, this month – and here we explore five pieces from the group.

Hanibal Srouji was born in 1957 in Beirut, Lebanon. He emigrated to Canada, via Cyprus, at the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and moved back to Beirut soon after the end of the War in 1990.

Red Sunset comes from a group combining neon lights, fire and paint on canvas. These materials make reference to Srouji’s childhood memories of 1960s and early 70s Beirut, when neon signs illuminated the centre of the city. At this time Beirut was the cultural and commercial heart of the Middle East, before the Civil War extinguished its lights for over 20 years.

The neon works are also an homage to the artists, workers and artisans who were part of the cultural and social phenomenon. Srouji’s own uncles, Eduard Akel and Victor Essayan, neon glass master and artist-designer, are also recognised in the choice of media.

Red Sunset can also be seen a sign of re-birth, namely, light and color on burnt canvas. The light can shine again, despite the background of troubled times.

Ahmed Alsoudani was born in 1975 in Baghdad, Iraq. He re-located to the US after fleeing Iraq in the mid-1990s.

Alsoudani is known for his vividly-coloured and surreal acrylic and charcoal canvases, where distorted, grotesque faces and body parts depict the horror of wars. Untitled draws on the artist’s own experiences of the wars in Iraq, the imagery of devastation and violence evoking a universal experience of conflict and human suffering.

The artist’s output has been compared with that of several high profile artists – for subject matter, with Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937), and, stylistically with the technique of both Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon.

In 2011 Alsoudani was one of five artists to represent Iraq at the Venice Biennale, the first time the country had hosted a pavilion in 35 years.

Batman, showing above, by Jason Noushin, dates from 2017 and is created in oil, shellac, ink, pencil, turmeric and comic book leaves, on linen (it measures 122 x 122cm). Noushin was born in 1969 in Tehran, Iran, he moved to Paris and then London after the Iranian Revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq and now lives and works in Connecticut.

Noushin defies categorisation and can be described as a draughtsman, painter and sculptor; he works in a wide variety of traditional, and not so traditional materials, which help to blur the lines between these disciplines. His use of materials articulates the worldly frameworks of memory, displacement and cross-cultural identity.

Paul Wadsworth, born 1964, identifies travel and performance as the two main influences in the development of his work. He has travelled extensively in the Middle East, showing works in Dubai and Muscat, with Arabic culture and its landscape running through much of what he produces. He paints whilst travelling and also keeps sketch books of observational drawings, which serve to jog his memory when back in the studio in Cornwall. His process is to work on multiple canvases simultaneously, developing the story as the paintings grow and a shared rhythm is established.

His life long interest in performance – of all kinds – informs the two oils on canvas at the Fair. He uses his experience of circus, burlesque, dance, theatre and street entertainers to either produce works from life or those inspired by the memories of these events and festivals.

London Art Fair | January 22 – 26 2020 | Business Design Centre, Islington, London N1 0QH