Iraqi painter Hanoos Hanoos presents his interpretation of the myth of the Tower of Babel at Casa Árabe
The Madrid headquarters of Casa Árabe hosts an exhibition of the Iraqi painter and engraver's artistic research on the myth of Babel
On Thursday, 5 February, the exhibition ‘From Babel to the Last King of Iraq: A Millennial Civilisation’, focusing on the work of Iraqi painter Hanoos Hanoos, was officially opened in the Hall of Columns at Casa Árabe's Madrid headquarters.
Although it had been open to the public since 29 January, the exhibition was inaugurated on Thursday, with the painter and engraver himself in attendance. He explained to the public the creative process behind the works on display, in which the myth of Babel is intertwined with the recent history of Iraq to explore how splendour and tragedy coexist in the same cultural heritage.
The myth of Babel
The exhibition focuses on two works by the painter and their respective sketches, which show the creative process of the Iraqi painter and engraver in arriving at the final version of the works.
The first of these is the work ‘Tower of Babel No. 50’, a myth that he admits has fascinated him since he was a child, when he used to pass by, in his native land, very close to the place where tradition places the tower.
This work is the culmination of a long artistic investigation into the Tower of Babel, inspired by Juan Luis Montero Fenollós and approached from the perspective of deconstruction and destruction as a metaphor for historical and contemporary chaos.
As the painter himself points out, "it is a biblical story from the Old Testament found in the book of Genesis that tells how Noah's descendants, after the flood, decided to build a city with a tower that would reach the sky to become protagonists and avoid being scattered across the earth. But God, seeing their arrogance, confused their languages so that they could no longer understand each other and were unable to complete the construction. There are very few artists in the world, from Brueghel the Elder to the present day, who have worked on this theme."
According to Hanoos Hanoos, "unlike Brueghel the Elder, whose famous 17th-century works depict the tower under construction, I have, in all humility, attempted to deconstruct these works on the Tower of Babel, focusing especially on the period after Yahweh's punishment of King Nemrod, with the sending of 72 angels who confused the workers by making them speak different languages."
The painter confessed that the message he wants to convey with this work "is that we have been living in permanent chaos from ancient times to the present day, which is what is happening today in many parts of the world with wars and very little consensus to resolve conflicts, just as happened at the Tower of Babel where everyone spoke a different language. It also refers to the fact that order and disorder are part of life itself, and that man often rebels out of unnecessary ego, that unjust rebellion that is part of our history."
In total, the Tower of Babel project consists of some 54 pieces, large and small, on which the author has been working for almost 20 years. ‘It is a figurative, complex work with a lot of information, although the images are not exactly visible, because you can't say everything. As with literature or cinema, you have to let the viewer's imagination work,’ he points out.
The massacre of Al-Rehab Palace
The other work featured in the Casa Árabe exhibition is ‘The Massacre at Al-Rehab Palace’, in which he reflects from a historical and autobiographical perspective on the assassination of King Faisal II, combining documentation and imagination, paying tribute to the monarch and evoking the violence of the event with references to Goya and Picasso, in a line of work focused on the massacres and collective traumas of the country.
Hanoos Hanoos has a degree and a PhD in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid. He began his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad (1974-1979) and, after travelling around Europe, completed his training in Madrid, where he obtained his PhD Cum Laude on the work of Al-Wasiti and where he has lived since 1981.
He has held a total of 41 solo exhibitions, participated in more than a hundred group exhibitions and received 41 painting awards, as well as grants from the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Hispanic-Arab Institute. His work, which includes more than 4,000 originals and numerous engravings and drawings, forms part of public and private collections in Spain and abroad.