Dr .Balasim Muhammed
Highlights
• Shakir has been drawing the simple aspects of life in Baghdad with its alleys and architecture.
• Three women…the artist found dynamic ways to express their expressed or repressed inner dreams.
• He reproduced folklore, which to him is a launching pad for memories and dreams.
• He is a master of variation on the same thematic location, and his repetition of the same locations and the intimacies in the general scenes, testifies to his ability to imbed a simple sentence with multiple meanings.
• Shakir Alousi sometimes transcends certain artistic forms used by artists of his generation. Instead he chooses to examine his daily scene—its architect—Baghdad’s distinctive windows, stairways, and tiles, to transform them into a recollection of the intricacies of his home country.
• His works are equally well received by the art world – galleries and museums – as well as by the public.
Artistic Inlays
Shakir Alousi exposes the power that lays in simple destitute, yet filled with life, existence; it all emerges like a ray of light out of his Iraqi roots. One feels that all the simple things that anchor his dreams are transcended into his works. The epiphanies of his dreams pushed him to new themes based on symbolic engravings, as if his paintings are a suitcase constantly on the move, painted with brief colors –brown, yellow, black and white…when we open that suitcase, we come across a long history of shapes which he depicts with special skill, and unique style. In other words his art can enunciate the folklore—its lines, curves, arches, and texture, all the while impregnating the painting with light, yet penetrating, energy.
Shakir the connected the everlasting effect of that message and modified the shapes to produce a trinity-based volume of work: three women, three forms, three engravings…etc, all maybe part of the eternal philosophy of the Trinity in the human mind. He is still very much absorbed in the spirit of Baghdad even though it has been a while since both of them were together –he defies the burdens of separation imposed by the ensuing time and distance. With all the things Shakir brings together in his art, he carries both an artistic, as well as, an intellectual component to it; he truly has earned his place in the pantheon of Iraqi art.
Translated by Dr.Ferris Nasheiwat
