About
Ali Rashid
artist and poet
Ali Rashid, an artist and poet. Born in Karbala in Iraq and moved to the Netherlands in 1996. Ali had numerous international exhibitions, Belgium, Germany, Norway, Denmark, France, Spain, Italy, Qatar, Libie, Jordan, Kuwait, Azerbedjan, Japan end so on.
Ali Rashid has published 3 selected poetry bundles and 1 book about art.
He wrote numerous articles about poetry and art, published in a wide variety of magazines and papers. From 2006 till 2021 he was editor of his own founded magazine Ila- magazine.
And Ali curated lots of exhibitions, is asked for juries in the field of art and participated in many international symposia.
Some years ago I visited a small island near the coast of Syria and there I saw walls that were, so to speak, talking to me. Children had painted their own hands as signs of protection on the walls. The paintings of Ali Rashid reminded me of those walls filled with vivid signs. One doesn’t have to be able to read the signs to feel that they are bearers of meaning. Rashid’s work is spacial, it has no center, no restrictions, it reverberates the impressions which lead to its existence and adds warmth to it. The canvases breath, in fact a wall in a small room like this, “grows” through the presence of the painting. Ali told me that he started to work with texts in an underground shelter during a war in Iraq. He was sitting there as a soldier with his notebook and he realised that the critical words he was writing down could bring him in a dangerous situation. So he starting drawing on the text, in the process of course making the text unreadable. Layer upon layer he created later on paintings like a palimpsest, a way of adding time to the essence of the work. Rashid developed a poetic use of signs which relates him to artists such as Antoni Tàpies and Joan Miró.
Wouter Welling, curator
The painter and poet Ali Rashid was born in Iraq, but he lives since 1994 in Holland. He has successfully completed his art studies in Iraq and in Holland at the Art Academy. He had exhibitions in various countries, e.g. Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Spain, Egypt and Japan apart from Iraq and Holland. In his work he tries to link his personal memories with the course of the general history. Memories from Iraq, the people there, his youth, his years during the war, the oppression, the poverty. By taking his memories as startingpoint for his work and placing them in a broader perpective, he tries to take responsibility as an artist for the world around him. During his time in Holland he is also looking for links between East and West. His work is strong but also poetic. As painter and poet he looks for methods to join lines with letters. This fascination finds its origin in the time of the war when poems (written from left to right as well as from right to left) were made illegible through drawings, thus becoming a matter of life and death.
Bastiaan R. Körner, gallery and former ambassador