Iraqi artist Athier Mousawi’s paintings are straight from the heart

He explores the consiousness of war in his latest show, Machine Hearts. We review it here.

Machine Hearts 11, a painting by Iraqi artist Athier Mousawi. Courtesy Athier Mousawi and Ayyam Gallery

From a distance, Athier Mousawi’s paintings could be seen simply as a visual treat of abstract form and colour, which attract a viewer simply because of the activity on the canvas. But they go much deeper than that.

The bright palette he chooses belies the serious questioning going on within the many layers of his work. Mousawi is Iraqi and his family left the country before the start of the first Gulf War in the 1980s.

Although he has never experienced war first-hand, he is deeply concerned with it – notably the consciousness that leads to one human killing another, whatever the reasons used to justify it.

This was the focus of his 2014 show in London, Man of War, in which he deconstructed jellyfish in his semi-abstract paintings.

For his latest series, Machine Hearts, which is on display at Ayyam Gallery in Alserkal Avenue, he takes the idea one step further and tries to depict the mechanised or robotic heart that he imagines one must have to kill others.

The title of the show actually comes from The Great Dictator, the 1940 Charlie Chaplin film, in which the actor condemned Nazi Germany. Chaplin says in the film: "Machine men with machine minds and machine hearts. You are not machines. You are not cattle. You are men."

Mousawi took that metaphor and in this body of work tried to visualise what a machine heart would look like.

“Each one starts with a core and then I added elements that a heart might have, such as pockets for the chambers and tubes, wires and electrical cable representing blood vessels, veins or arteries,” he says.

He also placed a lot of emphasis on the three-dimensional aspect of the pieces. There are several areas where looped wires spiral back into the canvas or triangular shapes seem to jut out of it.

In several cases within this exhibition, the artist continues his shapes on the gallery walls, underlining the effect – he worked hard to master this during his Beirut Art Residency last year.

What I love about his work is that you can spend a long time with each one.

They are awash with visual references from across the centuries – Mesopotamian wall reliefs, religious symbols, emergency police tape, wires and blood vessels – and there are also several figures woven between the shapes and forms.

Machine Hearts also features a return to drawing for the artist, the son of a renowned architect, who graduated in illustration from the Central Saint Martins in London. The works on paper and in black and white are like a blueprint to the larger canvases and give an interesting dimension to an already fascinating show.

• Machine Hearts runs until May 21, Ayyam Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai. www.ayyamgallery.com