Children

The oeuvre of Ahmed Nawash reflects the deep traumas and anxiety inherent to the Nakba (the catastrophe, mass explusion of Palestinians from their homeland) and his own experience fleeing to Amman, Jordan in 1948. The Palestinian artist would thus translate his personal feelings, and more generally those of a child, who had experienced exile, fear, and loss such as the figures in Children. Using a palette of cool colours, Nawash adopted a style between abstraction and figuration, reducing the features to simple lines and forms. He depicts a surrealist scene, the illustration theatrical in style. Children of different ages perform acrobatics and pose in a way that defies gravity, such as a boy flying with a covered girl on his back. The distorted bodies, the head with three faces, and the strange animal with the head of a sheep are pictorial elements which belong to a dream-like world, that resulted from a combination of reminiscence and inner thought. Even though the scene seems joyful, it is a visual interpretation of the human condition struggling for dignity.