From the series “Our Neighbor Paints Too, and Much Better Than Us,” we present a long-overdue exhibition of works by our local hero painter, Younis Al Azzawy, on Friday. He has chosen his fellow artist and painter, Kareem Sadoon, also from Iraq, as artistic support for the exhibition. Two Contemporary Paintings at the Palace:

Younis Al Azzawy & Kareem Sadoon

Exhibition opening on Friday, April 25, 2025, at 8 p.m.

Exhibition runs from April 25 to April 27, 2025
Open Saturday and Sunday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. and upon request

Kulturpalast Wedding International
Freienwalder Straße 20
13359 Berlin – Wedding
www.kulturpalastwedding.com
info@kulturpalastwedding.com

Painting to the max: Younis Al Azzawy is able to paint everything: the near, the far, and everything in between. S-Bahn stations, people standing around in local bars or forests, or new Van Gogh self-portraits. Nothing seems fixed or painted over; the motifs are in a constant state of dissolution, as if the painter, reluctant to continue elaborating, had recommended his paintings to simply continue painting themselves. It is this skillful painterly restraint that places Al Azzawy’s intense images in a shimmering state of suspension, allowing the various, consistently applied layers of paint to collide and take effect. The viewer finds themselves in the midst of a painterly process before a brilliant pictorial construction site, allowed to participate temporarily and mentally add everything that is absent.

The Sweden-based painter Kareem Sadoon is working on a differently complex resolution of image, paint application, and motif. In his mixed-media works, sculptural-looking figures, archaic-looking heads, and car-like pictograms encounter remnants of ornamentation, lines, and remnants of numbers and writing. Everything is interwoven through constant overpainting and obscuring. Kareem Sadoon’s pictures are reminiscent of an inadequately cleaned blackboard, on which the notes of the previous lessons shine through with each new application of chalk. This powerful all-over of information, combined with a simultaneous reduction to the essentials of the drawn line, makes the pages appear like archaic cartoons or a hard-to-decipher instruction manual for the entire world.

We look forward to this encounter of the simultaneous and the non-simultaneous, the not-yet and the no-longer, the Orient and the Occident, and everything else imaginable. A special thank you goes to our esteemed neighbor Younis Al Azzawy, who, in the 18 years of Kulturpalast Wedding International’s history, has never once complained about noise or nighttime disturbances. As the saying goes: “In Arabia, people are happy when their neighbors are celebrating a party. Then you know they’re healthy and still alive.”

That’s why things will be especially loud. Looking forward to it:

Kulturpalast Wedding International