Khaled Barakeh graduated in 2005 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus, Syria, and completed his MFA at Funen Art Academy in 2010 in Odense, Denmark. He has exhibited at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart; Golden Thread Gallery, Northern Ireland; Kunsthalle Brandts; Ovegarden, Denmark; Smack Mellon in New York City and many other institutions. Barakeh finished his Master’s Degree with Simon Starling, at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt am Main in 2013. He lives and works in Berlin.
Corporal and pictorial decomposition in the works of Khaled Barakeh
Khaled Barakeh is one of the fundamental artists of the new generation of Syrian art. These young post-modernist creators are currently imposing themselves in their militant resistance with a predominantly realist theme.
The world of Khaled Barakeh is dark and somber.
Two recurring figures – the body and the head – convey the most frightening obsessions of the human mind. His technique is subversive.
His painting are fraught with schizophrenia. They are apocalyptic, stigmatizing the decline of our world. The phantom, yet still human creature that haunts the tragic space of his paintings seems to be residing there for eternity. It is like a mummy, stricken over and over by death and by its resulting decomposition.
Without memory, it fades into the forgotten.
With broken flesh, the jagged body is presented in several changing textures.
Grattage, decollage, hatching and all the sadomasochistic technical strategies used give the paintings incomparable expression.
The originality of Khaled Barakeh’s artistic language is the result of a constant oscillation and ambiguity between “informal” materialism and the willful removal of all semiology. This work is the impossible encounter of Syrian expressionism in the sixties and seventies and French “new figuration”.
It forms an authentic and universal testimony of space and time.
Assad Arabi - Paris - 2005
