Ammar Assali
Ammar Assali’s recent work features many deformed characters, dehumanized shapes, and unclear features. Some hold a fancy weight, while others are chaotic. Assali was recently displaced from his shattered home in Damascus and has found refuge on a farm in the southern countryside of Turkey. This sense of eerie exile is shown clearly in his haunting portraits.
Assali’s work has an expressionistic, dreamy, silent, and halting side. It sometimes holds power and steadiness, and other times it seems weak, broken, and burdened with the weight of life’s troubles. It changes according to the changes of time and is deformed just like reality.
Assali was born and raised in Syria and holds a degree in fine art from Damascus University. He is currently experimenting with the idea of “portrait” and how it can convey the expressionistic state of the recipient as it speaks to the feelings, emotions, and mental states, evoked by the things and events which swirl around the artist. The faces and portraits are as far from reality as reality is from the truth.
