Artwork 2 Print

ahmed.kleige@gmail.com 0031657374114 "Mankind has always been the core of my work, through its details and through colour, I dive into the depths of shape and its implications, in hopes of finding what is silently and subtly hidden. It’s the longing for faces engraved in memory, refusing to depart. Exhausted facades kneaded with sweat and a sun that sighs away her pains, she is lost, far away from the colours of her soil, in labyrinths that returning from is nothing but a dream. Women whose feet have lost the warmth of the earth in a far eastern noon. They stand on the edge of sorrow and anticipation. These are the labyrinths of the soul." Ahmad Kleige was born in Aleppo, Syria, in 1964 and currently lives in the Netherlands. As a member of the Syrian Fine Arts Union in Damascus, he graduated from Fathi Mohamed Fine Arts Center, Aleppo, in 1988. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Lebanon at Unesco Palace, the American University of Beirut, and the Sursock Museum, as well as exhibitions across Europe. With Galerie Janine Rubeiz, he was part of a concept “Shattered faces” in 2013. He has held several solo exhibitions in Beirut, at Zamaan Gallery and at the Opera House in Damascus. His work has been acquired by different private collections and is permanently available at Galerie Janine Rubeiz. Beginning from an interest in the human figure - particularly faces - which opens soon enough into a visual mapping of catastrophe and oppression in the Arab world, Ahmad Kleige's signature paintings, often embedded in empty, blurry backgrounds, belong to a world fundamentally static and punctuated by political violence. From the massacres in the northern Iraqi town of Halabja, to the new realities of the Syrian civil war, the palette is gloomy and somehow alienated; the images are from a distant time, and the faces, albeit familiar, are never recognizable, they tend to break down into their own shapes, a leap into abstraction. The scenography, however, is distinctly that of war and conflict. Beset by internal turmoil, personal and political, Kleige enables the political realities of a region in conflict to surface, through the face of a woman alone.