“The Atrocity Exhibition”

Ahmed Alsoudani, Opened Ground

Courtesy Thierry Goldberg Projects

Borrowing its name from J.G. Ballard’s novel, “The Atrocity Exhibition” is an excursion into the apocalyptic. But while Ballard challenges the reader with a fragmented narrative, most of the works here don’t go far enough to surpass the limits of their own artistic conventions.

One exception is Ahmed Alsoudani, whose drawings combine the gestural fervor of Willem de Kooning, the violent inscriptions of Cy Twombly and the dark psychosexual subtexts of Carroll Dunham. In Opened Ground, Alsoudani captures the energy of carnage in a language that wavers between figuration and abstraction. This disjointed world, in which body parts and weapons abound, never settles into easy recognition, thus transmitting the trauma more effectively than if it’d been simply spelled out.

In contrast, Ben Grasso’s Stars and Stripes depicts an explosion amidst ricocheting stars, stripes, rockets and shattered debris. Decontexualized to the extreme—and suggestive of America in Iraq—the work seemingly fetishizes violence. Likewise, Molly Larkey’s metallic-painted Hydrocal mushroom clouds, “Bombs,” fixate on the exact instant of devastation. Slightly subtler are Wendy Heldmann’s paintings of crumbling buildings, whose vanquished infrastructures speak volumes about the aftermath of an untold cataclysmic event.

Immunized as we are to violence, it may be difficult to shock us out of our complacency. In this respect, straightforward illustration is no match for work willing to confront its own aesthetic assumptions.