Mohamad Omran
Mohamad OMRAN (Syria, 1979)
By Véronique Bouruet-Aubertot *
Born in 1979 in Damascus, Syria, Mohamad Omran graduated from the sculpture department of the Damascus Faculty of Fine Arts in 2002. While he began a career as a sculptor, his work was immediately acclaimed on the local art scene, already included many drawings. At barely 26 he began to teach in the sculpture department of the Fine Arts school. Two years later, in 2007, he decided to pursue his art history studies in France. In 2009 he defended his Master 2 thesis at the University of Lyon II; it concerned the Syrian artist Maher Al Baroudi, an artist torn between two cultures, who now lives in France. Mohamad Omran began a thesis on the image of the suffering body, while continuing to regularly publish articles in several newspapers of the Arab world (Al-Araby Al-Jadid, Le Journal- Foundation Atassi). He lives in France.
His sculptures and drawings, which from the beginning have concerned the human body and its expressive deformations, are an explicit denunciation of all despots, violence, and abuses of power. Disturbing men whose faces are hidden behind dark glasses, gas masks and other accessories, sit on chairs - secret police, powerful men… Their chilling immobility becomes even greater when they are lined up as if in a court of law. These small figurines, modelled in clay or resin, reappear on paper, each being closed off in his own solitude, even if the bodies are tangled together. Swarming over the entire surface of the paper, the figures saturate the space without hierarchy or perspective, offering no escape. The graphic rigour of sharply contrasting black and white predominates, though the artist sometimes uses coloured inks. As obsessive and oppressing as nightmares, these scenes are inhabited by hybrid creatures, half-human, half-animal, or half-machine, evoking the cruel and surrealistic universe of a Jerome Bosch or a Goya.
Mohamad Omran exhibits regularly in France, Europe and the Middle East, and his drawings are published in the press, including in France (Le Monde, Courrier International). He has also collaborated with other artists to create video works such as Sans ciel, a work he made in 2015 along with Bissane Al-Charif, in which the model of a city is progressively reduced to ashes.
The theme of assemblies and crowds, omnipresent in his work since 2005, today remains central to his work as a sculptor and draughtsman. The book Assemblage, Dark Nights Onto Rolling Waves, with a text by Odai Al Zoubi (2019), was recently devoted to him.
His work is part of many private and public collections, including the British Museum, the Institut du monde arabe museum in Paris (Donation Claude & France Lemand), the Ministry of culture in Syria and the Atassi Foundation in Dubai.
*An art historian, Véronique Bouruet-Aubertot was the editor of the contemporary art section of Beaux-arts Magazine until 2005. She began studies and research on art under South American dictatorships at the EHESS, further developing her work on art and politics. She was an exhibition curator for the Saison du Brésil in France, as well as in other contexts, and continues to explore new forms of restitution and cultural dialogue. She is the author of several books published by Autrement and Flammarion.