Amer Saleh al-Obaidi is a world renowned Iraqi artist whose paintings can be found in nearly every major museum of modern art in the Middle East. He is the former Director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad and former General Director of Fine Arts of Iraq. He has shown his paintings and earned awards in exhibitions and galleries in cities in several continents.
His story began in Baghdad, where he was born in 1943. He grew up in a large family who encouraged his passion for art throughout his childhood. His talent and mastery of design and color gained him early recognition and he won first prize at the celebrated International Festival in Ibiza, Spain at the age of 22. He began his career teaching art in Saudi Arabia, then designing illustrations for newspapers, magazines and children’s publications in his native Baghdad.
Amer’s achievements in the cultural ministry gradually propelled him through the administrative ranks of the Iraqi government’s best art museums. He organized national festivals, painted murals in airports across the country and traveled the world to display his work in Cairo, Sao Paulo, Moscow, London, Ibiza and Paris.
In 1975, Amer married Sawsan Abdulkarim, a school teacher who has been his constant “muse”. They raised two children, a son Bader and a daughter Bedor, in a big house in central Baghdad. Bader was killed in January, 2006, by a roadside bomb while he waited for his parents and sister who were shopping in the nearby market. Sawsan was seriously injured in the explosion and eventually lost her leg.
To escape the ongoing violence in Baghdad, Amer and his family fled Iraq in 2007, along with most of his country's cultural and intellectual elite who have been targeted for widespread attacks by extremists. After taking asylum in Syria, the family was referred for resettlement by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR). They arrived in Des Moines, Iowa in August, 2008, through the sponsorship of the Refugee Cooperative of Lutheran Services in Iowa /Catholic Charities. They carried five suitcases and one painting on a rolled up canvas.
Amer's work it's amazing and it had in Iraq's modern and ancient culture. Particularly, the inspiration he drew from the low relief sculptures of the Assyrians and their representation of horses, which are an important stylistic element of his work. His work reminded me of a modern interpretation of cubism, but in a passing way as Amer's work is more schematic and intensely colorful and not as sharply angular, more a matter of pattern and design which tends to flatten his images.
It appeared to me that Amer was sculpting his designs by building up the surface with layers of acrylic imposto, then continuing to draw and push his paint into and around the textured forms on large canvases.
Amer's work has been very popular in the Middle East. Since coming to the United States and living in Central Iowa he has had to adapt. There are many people who are not familiar with his work; it's refreshing spiritual intensity and sense of purpose. He paints a very consistent message through all of his work, a message of beauty and the simplicity and profound importance of love and the enjoyment of life: talking, eating, drinking, painting, visiting with friends and family, including his son who is no longer alive.
His work is filled with a combination of pathos and joy, a reflection of the economic and political realities of his life. It is not very often you find someone who believes in his or her work with the intensity that I have seen in Amer's art. It's not merely a decoration but a reminder or a token of a memory that is worth holding onto.
