Ali Eyal

US military operations in Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s defined Ali Eyal’s childhood in Baghdad. His art practice has become a means of processing the emotional impact of the violence he endured, the loss of many friends and family members, and the disorienting, unrelenting memories that compose what the artist calls “the after war.” Eyal’s monumental, immersive canvas captures his experience of visiting the massive twin waterfalls at the 9/11 Memorial in New York City and his conversation with a hot dog vendor who alluded to the burden of being far from family in Egypt. Eyal often begins his paintings with a first-person narrative. The stylistic and compositional decisions he makes during the act of painting pull the subject further from that narrative, however, allowing it to speak to a broad public. His multifigure compositions reject realism and verisimilitude. Although his figures are often based on people he knows, he renders them in a cartoonish, often grotesque style, and the structure of the compositions further distances his subjects from the viewer. Figurative paintings are conventionally read as windows into a space, but the tattered painted frame that surrounds And Look Where I Went (2025) suggests that we are instead looking at the pages of a book. Within the logic of the painting, this element mediates the narrative that Eyal has constructed.

Ali Eyal was born in 1994 in Baghdad. Trained as a painter, Eyal’s multidisciplinary practice considers the entanglements of personal memory, political violence, and loss. Solo and two-person exhibitions include Visible Records, Charlottesville, VA; ChertLüdde, Berlin (2024); Bellyman, Los Angeles (2023); Brief Histories, New York (2022); and Saw Center, Ottawa, Canada (2022). Recent group exhibitions include the 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025); 14th Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2025); Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne (2024); the Quebec City Biennale (2024); Bayt AIMamzar, Dubai, U.A.E. (2024); Chicago Cultural Center (2023); Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art, Berlin (2023); 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, São Paulo (2023); Sharjah Biennial 15, U.A.E. (2023); 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2022); Documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022); Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2020); MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2019); and Beirut Art Center, Lebanon (2018, 2019). He was a fellow in Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program, Beirut (2016–17). Eyal earned a BFA from the Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad (2015).