Mae Al-Jiboori, "Settling In"
- Democracy Chain
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
by Matthew Kangas
Blackfish Gallery, Portland, Oregon
Continuing through December 27, 2025
What is the difference between self-taught artists, folk artists and outsider artists? In his current exhibition Mae Al-Jiboori provides some answers — and further questions — about the increasingly complicated status of all three categories. While the exhibit is titled, “Settling In,” one wonders exactly into what the 28-year-old Tulsa native is settling: American culture? The Pacific Northwest? Urban society? Regardless, the nine works on view readily defy such categorizations.
They appear to be rehabilitated figurative Abstract Expressionist paintings with debts to Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston, but the latter is an artist with Al-Jiboori poses no familiarity. Similarly, having only begun painting four years ago, Al-Jiboori’s growth is that of an emerging unknown. However, he lived in London for a considerable period of time and visited numerous galleries there and elsewhere during his travels, Al-Jiboori agreed in an interview that an artist who makes more sense as an influence is Francis Bacon. Al-Jiboori’s sophisticated international sojourns preclude folk artist or outsider art status, but expose the artist’s slow and exacting development. He has not yet found his own distinctive artistic style or voice.
All the same, the pictures on view are compelling, even magnetic. Their assertive brushwork, advancing and receding spatial compositions, and close-value colors show promise, however derivative of prior art-historical movements they may be. It’s tempting to put Al-Jiboori into that catch-all silo of “global modernism,” which characterizes so many postwar artists in South Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Artists such as Tyeb Mehta and Etal Adnan have only recently received critical and curatorial attention for their affinities to abstract painting in the West, engaged with their own unique cultural expressions. Al-Jiboori, whose paternal grandfather is Iraqi, is a distant cousin to the movement.
In this sense, the painting “Staring into the fireplace” serves as an example of the artist shifting in and out of identifiable imagery. With its penetrating gaze and see-through skull, the four-foot-tall canvas introduces the rest of the series.
“In between breaths” repeats the single-figure motif but isolates it in one plane and posits a bald circular head indebted to Paul Klee, among others. It lacks the interesting compositional shifts of the other paintings here, but presents the unavoidable gaze seen in “Staring into the fireplace.”
“Dolor” is more anguished, a stooping figure about to wretch or submit to pain. At first it seems alone, with its references to political torture or submission and surrender. If Al-Jiboori were to intensify this direction, his work could take on greater power and contemporary relevance.
“Alone together” doubles the figures, entwining them in an erotic hold with broad diagonal slashes of blue against a bright yellow background. Their embrace is locked in by the confining blues and lifted up from the base of oranges as if fleeing a fiery fate below.
A parallel vision, “Full of Disdain,” could be a wrestling scene. Two interlocked figures, legs spread apart, battle on a pale white background with little indication of victory or outcome. Gradually, the artist’s consciousness of his own past or heritage home-country issues emerge. Elsewhere they appear in appealing bright colors against ominous dark backgrounds.
Seen in this context of turbulent aggression and human interchange, the rest of the paintings underscore multiple figures in increasingly complex compositions. For instance, “spectators who don’t intervene” doesn’t literally reflect its title but functions as the most successful among his abstract paintings. Splayed diagonals burst out of a combustible center of reds, greens, and blues. “Slow descent of closing time” comes closest to a dismembered version of Bacon, with heads and limbs dangling, bloodied in the possible aftermath of an interrogation or torture scene.
Calmer colors and splashy brushwork provide a coda to the sequence in “Greed around our necks,” the largest work here at 4 by 8 feet. More dependent upon black outlining than any of the other paintings, it sacrifices modernist color affinities for stretched-out subliminal drawings of elongated figures in an angry pastoral scene, the closest thing to a landscape within the series. Seen alongside the other works, the artist’s world is expanded beyond his interior psychological visions to the outer world where such scenarios play out in real time. Al-Jiboori’s work displays promise and challenge; culmination and conclusion are yet to come.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.
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