Hanoos’ vantage point ties the contemporary with the ancestral, reinterpreting the vestiges of a civilization in a way which serves up metaphors for humanity itself. His creative process, both meticulous and nearly obsessive, uses chaos as a springboard to construct narrative images infused with mysteriousness and malaise. The artist uses these images to transform historical memory into his own visual language, with the personal and the collective engaging in mutual dialogue. As a result, both stories from the Bible and episodes from Iraq’s modern history are employed as universal reflections on power, violence and human fragility.

The exhibition revolves mainly around two works, Tower of Babel N° 50 and The Massacre at Al-Rehab Palace, as well as a set of sketches which bear witness to the artist’s journey until creating his final work. On the one hand, it can be seen as a prolonged artistic investigation into the Tower of Babel, inspired by Juan Luis Montero Fenollós and approached from the perspective of deconstruction and destruction as a metaphor for historical and contemporary chaos. On the other, his interest in social art and Iraq’s historical memory are given form inThe Massacre at Al-Rehab Palace (2025), in which he performs reflection from a historical and autobiographical perspective on the assassination of King Faisal II, combining documentation and imagination, to pay tribute to this monarch while evoking the violence of the event, with references to Goya and Picasso, in a line of work which focuses on the killings that have occurred in the country and the collective trauma it has endured.

About the artist
Hanoos Hanoos (Kufa, 1958) is a painter, etching artist and professor. Hanoos earned his bachelor’s degree and PhD in Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He began his studies at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad (1974-1979) and, after traveling throughout Europe, he completed his training in Madrid, where he earned his doctorate with a “cum laude” distinction on the work of Al-Wasiti. He has lived in Madrid since 1981.