Wall in a Moment: Riyadh Neama February 10 -26, 2009   The Courtyard Gallery & Café showcased the works of Iraqi artist Riyadh Neama. Riyadh belongs to a generation of artists who, amid fear and suffering, developed a remarkable talent for the visual arts. That led to Neama's choice to showcase the child and male-female love in his exhibition. In this show, the child is not a symbol of the future but of innate courage, resilience and survival. A playful schoolboy defiantly overlooks the harshness of concrete walls. The devastation of war, sanctions and death, offered further ammunition for play, as he leaps at us through the barricading concrete walls, totally oblivious of us. In this exhibition grey, black and white dominate his paintings in sharp contrast to more scarce red, green, and orange. Despite their usually quiet mood, the three dominating colors appear overwhelmingly loud in their sharp and random lines: a depiction of human struggle for survival along a dark path of turbulent history.           Courtyard Gallery all rights reserved. privacy policy